Polly Toynbee says the press has been barred from scrutinising frontline NHS services (Tin-eared Liz Truss is obsessed by tax cuts, so why shouldn’t NHS nurses strike?, 12 September). Thankfully, patients and their relatives can still do so. As a relative, I can report from weeks of scrutiny of a busy oncology ward in a London hospital that the NHS epitomises what it means to be human. I have witnessed consistent patience, tenderness, warmth, skilled medical care, comfort and careful consultation with patients about their choices.
I also sometimes catch sight of a lonely figure in blue, a doctor who has no time to sit down and eat in the middle of the night. I see the exhausted faces of nurses who nevertheless manage to reassure anxious patients and their families, and are meticulous in meeting all their patients’ needs, despite 13-hour shifts in dire circumstances. Underpaid and undermined by our government, these valiant workers need our help. If they do go on strike, I will be on the picket line – and I urge everyone who has ever needed or might ever need the NHS to join them in solidarity.
Drusilla Long
Leeds
• Polly Toynbee’s piece quotes the Royal College of Nursing’s general secretary, Pat Cullen: “The new secretary of state should take time to walk in their [exhausted nurses’] shoes for a week.”
These are important words. All MPs should spend time seeing how the other half live, and not just those challenges facing NHS staff. They should have to live in unsafe housing, find support for elderly people or childcare, and balance household budgets on universal credit. Perhaps then we might see a move towards greater fairness in how the country is governed.
The World Bank has in the past run a “village immersion programme” for key staff, giving them the opportunity to live in a developing country and experience first-hand the implications of poverty, inadequate water and sanitation, and lack of access to healthcare. Given that MPs seem to have no formal training, perhaps they need a similar induction before entering the Commons.
Bill Kingdom
Oxford
• In your report (Millions of UK patients forced to go private amid record NHS waiting lists, 11 September), Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, reminds us of the founding principle of our NHS: that it caters for everyone and does not discriminate based on whether people can pay. Over the last 12 years, the NHS has been starved of adequate funding. One could be forgiven for thinking that this might have been partly due to a desire to encourage private health insurance companies to move in.
Have health service policymakers focused too much on outsourcing parts of the NHS, when the most pressing need was to deliver efficient services to all who need treatment? The public has been given only snippets of information on the handover of parts of the NHS to private companies. The whole truth would astound us all.
Alan Kembery
Solihull, West Midlands
• Why should someone with limited financial resources be denied the same health treatment as a wealthy individual? You can see the government’s strategy: force as many people who can cope with the cost of private medical care to abandon the NHS so that the government can avoid raising the level of taxation to fund the NHS properly. The same obsession against taxation evidently applies to building houses, sewage treatment, flood prevention, education, social care, public transport and so on.
Chris Osman
Oxford
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