Rethink NHS

but were captured at St Valeryen-caux and incarcerated in POW camps for five long years. I have friends whose fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters never made it back home at all. My own grandmother was killed in the Tyneside blitz.

I do not ask for pity. We did not starve, thanks to the incredible bravery of the Merchant Navy who daily crossed the Atlantic to bring us food, and of the Royal Navy who escorted them. And we are eternally grateful to all our parents’ generation who saved us from Nazi occupation. It would be quite nice, however, if every now and then people saw us not as “The Redundant Generation”, but in this different light. After all, we have paid into the National Health far longer than anyone else, and because of us there is the next generation, and the one after that. We have had our uses. Your headline “Closing down hospitals ‘could be essential for stricken NHS’ ” (25 July) highlights the actual position of resources in the Scottish NHS, unlike the politically motivated wishful thinking of health minister Shona Robison and the SNP.

Politicians are ill serving the public by trying to outbid each other on what their particular party can do for the NHS that their opponents can’t. All this does is raise public expectations that any drug or any treatment will be freely available on demand or that any facility can be kept open regardless of circumstances.

With resources being scarce, why are the SNP wasting public money on yet more universal services like free baby boxes and free sanitary products? Even free prescriptions, whose costs have spiralled vastly out of control under the SNP, needs to be looked at again. Vanity projects are very In three practices over the last four years, I have never had to wait more than a day for an urgent appointment with a GP. In reading recent data from the Royal College of GPS I am left wondering if the figures are distorted by patients who demand to see a particular doctor or refuse a “telephone appointment” and the availability of appointment times reduced by a high percentage of “no-shows”.

I have no links to the medical profession, I’m an ordinary user of community health care with nothing but praise for the service I have received in three postcodes over the last