SIR – BEFORE the 2010 General Election, David Cameron promised, “No top-down reorganisation in the NHS” yet that was precisely what he did after he gained power, to enormous financial cost. The “Health and Social Care Act 2012” allowed for burgeoning involvement of the private sector, making huge profits out of what was supposed to be a public service.
And what was the result of this and Conservative-led stewardship of the NHS? Well, today we find an NHS dangerously strapped for cash, buckling under financial pressures and with lengthening queues and waiting times to be seen at GPs’ surgeries and in hospitals up and down the country. Many who can’t get appointments and mistrustful of the discredited NHS111 telephone service the Tories introduced, end up at hospital A&Es, causing logjams there. And the Tory vision of completely privatising social care has led to chaos where hospitals find beds occupied by the elderly who have nowhere else to go – the so called "bedblockers."
The NHS is highly-prized by most British people as a wonderful innovation and seen as one of the best health care systems in the world. However, one wonders, considering what they’ve already done, if the Conservatives get in at this election, what will be left of it in five years time?
David Hornsby, West View Avenue, Wrose
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