The local health service was put severely to the test over the Christmas period. It did not stand up to it very well. In fact, as far as hundreds of people seeking advice and treatment outside their GPs' surgery hours were concerned, it failed badly.

When an out-of-hours service becomes log-jammed, as happened at Leeds-based Healthcall when the switchboard failed to cope with the volume of calls, then the system is clearly in need of radical treatment.

True, we are currently in the middle of a flu epidemic. But that surely was not entirely unforeseen. It had been building up for some days before Christmas. And even without that, Christmas is always a testing time for the medical services. People eat and drink too much and make themselves accident-prone.

Whatever contingency plan there was to cope with that, plus any additional burdens caused by influenza, obviously was not good enough. The sick people of Bradford were left hanging on for hours waiting for a response to their telephone call to Healthcall or had to get themselves to other out-of-hours clinics.

There is good advice today from a GP for people outside the high-risk groups to ease the pressure on the service by looking after themselves. But for the sake of all those people who are considered to be at risk of complications from influenza - the young and the old, and those with chest or heart problems - and need to be checked out by a doctor, it is to be hoped that the Health Authority can oversee the setting-up of a system which is better able to stand the strain.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.