NHS staffing crisis

sir – As a former GP, I am not surprised that the NHS is struggling to recruit and retain staff.

Frontline clinicians are expected to make universal free healthcare work, with little or no protection from the architects of that policy. It was possible with the post-war generation but is no longer viable, especially with patients who think that abuse – verbal and online – and frank intimidation are the way to conduct social interactions.

And it is not just patients. Successive reorganisations have vastly increased the bureaucratic workload, and as performance assessment and clinical targets are part of this system, they can become a tool for intimidation and often outright bullying. There is also the effect of the pandemic, when our lack of hospital beds left staff facing desperate situations on a daily basis.

Only radical reform can solve these problems, but it needs to begin in Westminster, where most of these problems originated.

Chris Nancollas

Yorkley, Gloucestershire

sir – An NHS source recently claimed that a telephone consultation helped to save energy. This is a conversation, not a consultation, which requires a patient’s presence. I know from years of observing a person’s appearance on entry to a consultation that you can tell a great deal before a word is spoken, and it takes seconds.

If, as a medical student, Arthur Conan Doyle had not been so impressed by the acute observations of his clinical teacher, Dr Bell, there would have been no Sherlock Holmes. Roy Miller FRCS

Cambuslang, Lanarkshire

sir – A consultant’s letter in June requested “my” GP to issue me a prescription. By July, and several phone calls later, the request was still not “on the system”, so no prescription could be issued. Finally, when I went in person, the letter was “found”, and the prescription issued.

It is not only a lack of GPS – the entire system is falling apart.

LF Buckland

Iwerne Minster, Dorset