NHS performance

SIR – Your headline “Our feckless NHS is squandering Rishi Sunak’s tax raid” (Comment, April 30) was insulting and inaccurate.

People throughout our NHS and social care system are moving heaven and earth to recover ground and reduce care backlogs while dealing with the continuing impact of Covid-19.

The pressure we saw pre-covid across all NHS services has been massively exacerbated by the pandemic. Over the past few months, the NHS has faced a triple whammy of Covid-related challenges: high staff absences, many linked to Covid; more people in hospital with Covid than expected; and significant delays in discharging patients, partly due to Covid’s ongoing impact on social care services.

Yet, thanks to the hard work of frontline staff, ambulance services are working at a level never seen before, with call-outs a third higher than pre-pandemic. With more than 2.1 million A&E attendances, hospital emergency care saw the busiest March on record.

Activity to bear down on care backlogs has increased. GP appointments are exceeding prepandemic levels. More people have been seen for suspected cancer and more CT scans are being conducted than before the pandemic.

NHS leaders are passionate about improving health outcomes. They do not see the NHS as a sacred cow that cannot be improved, and recognise that transformational change is vital.

But they also know that their frontline staff are as committed as ever and are working flat out for the people they serve. Those staff speak of feeling burnt out and exhausted, but still strive to give patients the best possible quality of care.

Chris Hopson

Chief executive, NHS Providers

Professor Martin Marshall

Chair, Royal College of General Practitioners

Matthew Taylor

Chief executive, NHS Confederation London SW1

SIR – I write this outside an A&E department where we have just been forced to abandon my 82-year-old father, who has fallen and hit his head, because patients may not be accompanied.

This, in the week where Parliament heard that hospital and care home visiting restrictions are “cruel, inhumane and unnecessary”.

Our caring NHS? What a joke. Stephen Sanderson

London SE8