Your correspondent (WMN letters July 17) considers NHS to stand for Naff Hospital Service citing the RD&E Hospital as an example and quoting horrendous waiting times. All hospitals in England are destined to become Foundation Trusts and the RD&E became one several years ago. Foundation Trusts are their own masters. No doubt this was thought to be a great idea at the time and the intention was that efficiency would increase once each Trust was holding its own purse strings. Unfortunately the result has been that the bottom line has become all-important. From a National Health Service attempting to provide a level standard of care across the country the NHS has degenerated into a collection of profit and loss calculating pseudo businesses.
Many of these 'businesses' are now going to the wall or providing poor care but with the huge salaries paid to management seemingly untouchable. Many if not most of those management salaries are, like those of bankers and BBC employees, beyond the dreams of most of the users of the service (and to be included in those figures would be degree-trained so-called nurses). In health it is very difficult to standardise care – so many 'points' for any one procedure ignores whether the recipient of the procedure is an otherwise healthy 25-year-old or a soon-to-die-in-any-case 90-year-old. We have arrived at a service once held in world esteem now dropping to one which has become a world-viewed scandal with horror stories abounding. Much is made of the danger of privatisation. When hospitals became 'companies' this was already complete. Again, much has been made of private companies waiting to take over the NHS. If those companies can provide an efficient service avoiding the horrors that we have seen over the last 10 years then one can only say good luck to them.
At present we have the worst of all worlds, with we the 'shareholders' having no say. Nurses' at the battle front prove to be lowly paid assistants who have received one tenth of the training of their degree-trained, computer-watching, too-posh-to-wash-bums overlords.
Overworked doctors prove to be the few very junior members of the profession manning the fort over nights and weekends whilst their hugely salaried colleagues do not deign to work outside nine to five.
Who is to blame for this debacle? I believe there is a Latin phrase which asks 'Who guards the guardians' and never was this more apt. Successive governments have allowed management bodies, medical professional bodies and many other financially interested parties to bamboozle them.
No-one has grasped the nettle and taken control. The NHS became a series of business ideals and management speak. And all over the country people were dying unnecessarily and waiting as your letter-writer says indefensible waiting times.