Philip Wood on having to turn to private treatment because of health service underresourcing, Dr Pilar Murphy on staff shortages and Dr Euan Strachan-Orr on the pressure GPs face
Your editorial (22 September) and Rachel Clarke’s excoriating opinion piece (Instead of helping desperate NHS doctors like me, Thérèse Coffey is sticking in the boot, 22 September) demonstrate how the Tories continue to mismanage and impoverish state health and social care. George Osborne’s failed austerity economics, with a massively underfunded workforce and training provision, have led to a toxic escalation of costly – to the taxpayer – reorganisation/marketisation/outsourcing/privatisation. This is not going to be reversed by Thérèse Coffey’s risible “ABCD” agenda, which is based on no new investment.
I was on an 18-month waiting list for laser surgery on my prostate. Informed of little hope of medium-term surgery, I opted for private treatment, saw a urologist within a fortnight and was operated on shortly after. Astonishingly, I was contacted a week later by my local hospital offering the surgery using the same surgeon and private hospital in an attempt to shift the backlog. This urologist has a dual NHS and private consultancy – expensively trained by the state, but now enabling the private sector to offer desperate pensioners like myself a very expensive alternative. I would suggest that all NHS-trained doctors, nurses and consultants be salaried state employees and not allowed to moonlight. Then we may return to the original Bevan vision of free and first-class health provision regardless of status and income.
Philip Wood
Kidlington, Oxfordshire
