The role of GPS

sir – Miranda Levy (Features, October 31) laments the loss of named GPS and drop-in, face-to-face appointments. So do GPS, because the job was much less stressful in the old days – and much more fulfilling.

We romanticise Dr Finlay’s Casebook, but would soon complain if the GP had only a few drugs and a chest X-ray at their disposal. Thirty years ago patients who phoned at 3am would apologise for disturbing you; a decade later they would ring because they couldn’t sleep – that made two of us.

Expectation and demand have forced GPS to leave, making it tougher for those who remain. The paradox is that both patients and doctors want personalised family care and enough time for every patient.

In my area, as in the rest of the country, GP numbers have fallen. Yet the number of orthopaedic surgeons at Ipswich Hospital has grown from four to 28. They can deliver personalised medicine, quite unlike the lonely crisis management of primary care.

Shouting at GPS will soon be like shouting in the wilderness, because you can only flog a horse until it dies. Dr John Havard FRCGP

Saxmundham, Suffolk

sir – I wish to applaud your Leading Article ( November 7) criticising the Royal College of Nursing’s strike plan, which members have now voted for.

I am saddened that the RCN recommended its members to vote this way. I have been a member since October 1989, but my circumstances changed recently and, as a result, I was not allowed to vote. If I had, I would have voted against strike action. It will put patients’ lives at risk.

Mary Moore

London E2

sir – Like Yvonne Moffatt (Letters, November 7), I have had duplicate NHS letters delivered on the same day and from the same source – one telling me I had a face-to-face hospital appointment and it was essential I attended, the other saying it was a telephone appointment and that I must not attend in person.

Keith Chambers

Brockenhurst, Hampshire