Get NHS back to normal now

Dear Editor Margaret Sutherland is right (Observer Letters, June 10). The NHS is not working. It was told last March by the government - in a fit of panic, and with complete lack of foresight - to run for the hills. Everything was cancelled at a stroke. Only Covid patients were to receive its attention.

People stopped contacting their GPs, eventually leading to the Scottish Government’s National Clinical Director, the redoubtable Professor Jason Leitch, popping up at every TV advert break to try to persuade us to do so.

Admittedly, some NHS cancer operations have taken place in private hospitals (a nice little earner for these hospitals, which they will no doubt be keen to hang on to) and some people have received scans etc, but, basically, the rest of it has gone to the wall. This means that there is now such a huge backlog that, on the face of it, the NHS will never catch up. People waiting for hip and knee replacements are not even on the radar, so many older people will now be unlikely, quite literally, to get those operations before the end of their natural lives.

To date, the whole of the Forth Valley area has had only around 950 cases of coronavirus. Only a fraction of these will have been hospitalised and only seven of them are in hospital as I write. How have the staff of all the other disciplines at FVRH been passing the time for the last three months?

No obvious strategy to deal with any of this is currently emerging from a government still obsessed with making sure that Scotland’s lockdown lasts far longer than those of the rest of the UK. Indeed, Nicola Sturgeon has had the temerity to call on the UK Treasury to provide yet further funds to finance the results of her excessive delay in lifting the lockdown.

Scotland’s economy is on its knees. It will not recover unless major new strategy emerges pretty quickly from its seat of government.

As to the NHS, Covid patients should be housed in separate, designated accommodation, equivalent to the old fever hospitals (the Louisa Jordan should be one such).

Everyone else, including the resting bulk of the NHS, should by now be up, out and getting on with things, instead of simply drifting along in an induced coma of fear and uncertainty.

Mary Maxwell-Irving Telford House Blairlogie