NHS bureaucracy

SIR – Denis Wilkins (Letters, May 12) is absolutely correct: the intrusion of “management” into the NHS has been to its detriment. Clinical priorities can be made only by clinicians.

Since 1982 various secretaries of state for health have tried to remove this responsibility from medically trained people, both in specialist hospital practice and general practice, with the result that is all too obvious in today’s unacceptable waiting lists.

The situation is not helped by the employment of senior managers in the NHS on obscene salaries. Every doctor knows that none of them will make the slightest difference to patients, who continue to tolerate an ineffective system of health care.

Dr Rob Caird FRCGP

Greywell, Hampshire

SIR – My father, one of the last medical superintendents, ran a large hospital in Stoke-on-trent with a matron and one hospital secretary.

Tony Lewis FRCOG

Southampton