Dig deep and pay for improved care service
WOULD you accept agency police officers, fire officers or members of the armed forces?
So why accept agency nurses?
Don’t get me wrong agency nurses are just as good as health board nurses and most of them moved to agencies for better pay and working hours but as they don’t work regularly on a ward, they don’t know the patients and it’s more difficult when the patients are elderly and have the low mental capacity to remember themselves.
By paying our healthcare workers better, you retain staff from going to agencies, early retirement or just leaving for a better-paid job and would recruit more staff.
Reduce the number of elderly waiting to return back to their homes and reduce bed blocking, by paying community nurses, and health care workers more money and again retain staff and encourage more to join. Also, on the patients’ side, more beds are available to help in reducing waiting lists.
The Tories have had over 12 years of investing in the NHS but failed to put the money in the right areas. Andrew Nutt
Bargoed
Private healthcare not way to fix NHS
I agree with Ian Roblin’s (South Wales Echo letters November 9) notion that we should discuss ways of improving the current state of the NHS and that people should take much more responsibility for their own health.
However, I fundamentally disagree with his belief that the introduction of private healthcare into the NHS system is the answer. You only have to look to one of the richest countries in the world, the US with its own private healthcare system, where the poor and those with chronic illness are under treated or not treated at all while the rich and worried well are overtreated.
As an economist I am sure he would see that despite all the difficulties in the NHS it still provides excellent value for money.
The main issue is one of adequate funding and the NHS has been underfunded for many years, especially in the last 12. Indeed, we have one of the lowest funded health services in the developed world.
Part of the reason for this is due to ideology because many Conservatives cannot stomach the fact that the NHS is founded on socialist ideals and actively set out to destroy its guiding principle of free equitable healthcare for all regardless of the ability to pay.
For example, In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher introduced compulsory competitive tendering, particularly in the NHS, but failed so England chose to introduce privatisation by stealth.
Her decision to sell off the nation’s silver and open up competition has also backfired, and we are now paying the price for this while the fat cats are grinning.
The public needs to wake up and realise that the chronic underfunding by the Tories is strangling the NHS to death.
The Tories want to force more people to use private healthcare and thus set in motion the eventual demise of the NHS.
Personally, I would nationalise all private healthcare and bring it under the control of the NHS to increase capacity. Only then would we see a massive funding injection as we would all be in the same boat and politicians would have a personal stake in maximising the country’s wealth for the benefit of all.
Bob Jenkins
Canton, Cardiff
Problems in Welsh rugby run deep
The Tories have had over 12 years of investing in the NHS but failed to put the money in the right areas
Andrew Nutt Bargoed
I chose to write this letter before the game against Argentina because, as far as I’m concerned, the result will not change my opinion.
Welsh rugby is in a mess and the national team is now showing the evidence of this. The Welsh team has been punching above it’s weight for some time and great credit is due to all the players who have played their parts in doing this. Now, however, the state of Welsh rugby is a sad one and I base my opinion on the following reasons.
Firstly, the Welsh team is coached by a man who, in my opinion, is way out of his depth at this level. To have listened to his comments about preparing for the World Cup is a joke. Wales has made no progress since he took over from Warren Gatland. We see no player development, no game plan and no consistency in selection. Any talk of Wales being a force in the next World Cup is, to me, a nonsense as this team may be able to pull off a ‘one-off’ success as it did against a weakened South African team last summer, but it will not be able to play consistently well enough to achieve any more than that.
Secondly, player confidence is all but gone. There wasn’t much left in the regional players after their teams have failed dismally in the URC for too long. I read that Justin Tipuric – a credit to Welsh rugby – says that Wales is ‘hungry’ following last week’s hammering by New Zealand. May I ask why the players weren’t ‘hungry’ for success last week or whenever they pull on the Welsh jersey? Motivating a Welsh rugby team should not be difficult however it isn’t always evident in matches as we saw clearly last week and in the Italian game last season.
Finally, we have no depth in the player pool here in Wales. Wayne Pivac complains that some players are not physical or aggressive enough for international rugby. That has been the case for many years with some notable exceptions. Wales has never produced the physical types of players that some other teams seem to reel out on a production line. This was certainly the case when he took over as Wales coach and so it has been his responsibility to develop game plans to help overcome these problems. He has continually failed in this task.
Because our player pool is so limited he has continually played players out of position and selected several players who, through no fault of their own, have been out of the game for long periods due to injury. I’m pretty sure that many Welsh rugby supporters could easily draw up a list of players unlikely to be available for many games due to new injuries or a recurrence of old ones. It should have been obvious to Mr Pivac that this was the
case and so other players from the regions should have been spotted and developed as capable back-ups. As an example it wasn’t too long ago that we were led to believe that we had so many excellent back-row players that we seemed to breed them in Wales. Now however, we seem to struggle to find an effective back-row combination. What has happened to all these players and just as importantly, what has happened to their confidence when they have been discarded in selections?
The ridiculous rule stopping players represent their country if they play outside Wales does not help. It hurts me having to say that if I were asked to advise a very promising young player on how to improve his skill level and progress in the game , I would have to say “start by finding a successful club across the border.”
I would love to see Mr Pivac begin to stamp his personality on our national team so that some of the issues I have listed are addressed and things improve but I don’t really hold out much hope.