Overhauling social care is the only way to keep the NHS from collapse
SIR – Professor Keith Willett (Commentary, May 29) is absolutely right to highlight maximising hospital capacity as one of the key challenges facing the NHS.
However, the failure by successive governments to fund social care adequately has resulted in vital community support being skinned to the bone.
The NHS requires an immediate increase in funding just to respond to the increases in demand. It also needs to realign its funding to incentivise keeping patients, particularly the frail and elderly, in hospital for the minimum time required. Fundamentally, it will require an expansion of community care and seamless integration with social care.
Failure to act will only heap more pressures on the NHS, meaning more older people lose out. George Mcnamara
Director of Policy, Independent Age London W14
SIR – The public rightly wants an NHS that is available at the time of need. However, the Government only offers an NHS where the delivery, albeit free, is often months or years after the time of need.
Some of my constituents now choose to pay the full cost of their operations so that they can be carried out when they need them, instead of at a time chosen by an NHS administrator. Many more would follow a similar course if they were able to share the costs with the NHS through voluntary co-payment. Such sharing would also bring more resources into the NHS and help to reduce waiting lists.
If free social care is not available when it is needed by those ready to leave hospital, wasteful delays are the result. Allowing co-payment would help to address this problem.
Instead of increasing contributions to the NHS from collective taxation, the Government should be encouraging individuals to contribute personally towards the cost of their own treatment. Removing the tight restrictions against co-payment introduced by the Labour government in 2009 would help to facilitate this. Sir Christopher Chope MP (Con) London SW1
SIR – Dame Esther Rantzen suggests (report, May 30) that pensioners should give up their winter fuel allowance to help pay for the NHS.
We expats already have. The allowance was “confiscated” by Iain Duncan Smith, on the grounds that minus six degrees Celsius in France is somehow warmer than minus six degrees in Britain.
We look forward to returning next winter and being treated for hypothermia by a newly enriched NHS. Sandy Watt
Melrand, Morbihan, France
SIR – It would be far more sensible for foreign aid to be reduced and the funds diverted to the NHS.
Pensioners must keep warm in order to keep well. W V Gorman
Kenilworth, Warwickshire