The NHS cannot survive if it clings to an outdated funding model
SIR – If the only effect of the Seventies Royal Commission into the NHS was to reduce bureaucracy (leading article, February 11), its benefits have been long overtaken by later changes.
We don’t need a Royal Commission to report in four or five years’ time at a cost of millions. As you point out, we know what is wrong with the NHS. What we don’t have is a plan to fix it: a decision which is quite properly political, except that our politicians are treating it as too much of a hot potato.
Changes in demand and in what medicine can do mean that the original model, however suitable for the Forties and Fifties, is not sustainable. A free service that offers all kinds of healthcare to our whole population is unaffordable today. If politicians can offer a meaningful vision for what we could achieve, then we might start working towards a realistic goal.
Tony Fry
Ruthin, Denbighshire
SIR – Philip Duly (Letters, February 11) advocates more private involvement in the NHS. Over the past few years we have seen the privatisation of the railways, buses, gas, electricity and water. This has not produced cheaper services, and many are now owned by foreign companies or investors.
I am a great believer in private enterprise – but only when it can produce a better or similar service at a cheaper price.
Howard Stevens
Stockton-on-Tees, Co Durham
SIR – The fact that surgeons are left kicking their heels in the NHS (report, February 13) is nothing new. I was a consultant surgeon in the mid-Eighties when I wrote to Margaret Thatcher to tell her that I was working in my garden on a Monday morning instead of doing my operating list, because there were no beds for patients.
The patients on whom I should have operated were then put back on the waiting list and had to be treated at a later date, thus making my operating list longer. In spite of those events, successive governments have continued to close beds, meaning that the problem today is even worse.
Just over 10 years ago, a Labour minister told us in public that the only reason that we had waiting lists was because surgeons were on the golf course instead of working. This attitude to surgeons – who had spent many hours working at weekends and at night – was so demoralising that, shortly after, I took early retirement.
Michael Lavelle
Scaynes Hill, West Sussex
SIR – Some of the blame for the situation in the NHS should be placed on our local planning authorities.
We have seen many new housing developments, and large increases in population, without the necessary increases in infrastructure.
The result is overloaded GP surgeries. Had local authorities made additional GP facilities a requirement in the developments, we might have avoided this problem.
Andrew Spanner
Watford, Hertfordshire