Letters - December 14, 2019

Some years ago when I was in my 20s I was at home one Saturday morning listening to the radio. Out of the blue a comment was made from the radio that cancer would be cured in five years.

Some 30 years later, I watched my wife of 47 years approach her death from breast cancer over three short months.

In the end she was unable to speak and her last attempts to communicate with me at her moments of death where unintelligible to me.

Tell your experts that these experiences with cancer are the reason that a third of the population are gloomy about cancer.

They talk about living longer with cancer, but in what state?

There does not appear to be any hope of stopping cancer and this is 60-odd years after that statement I heard on the radio.

When some real hope is shown that there is a “cure” for cancer, then the public will be far less gloomy about it.

Phil Moon

address supplied

Health

Questions over NHS money

All the main political parties stated in their election documentation that they would spend a large amount more on the NHS to solve the problems that exist. This is totally the wrong thing to do.

If you are a car owner and your car is losing oil badly, you do not just keep putting more oil in, you find out why it is losing oil. The NHS needs treating the same way, someone needs to ask the question “what is going wrong?” The answer there is quite simple.

Prior to the changes brought in by Tony Blair’s Labour Government in the mid-1990s, the NHS worked for the patient. No, it was not perfect but it worked.

Hospitals were run by a small management committee which contained health specials, now they are run by appointed trust boards who could not run a booze-up in a brewery, let alone an organisation such as a hospital. You have four managers for every person involved with patient care, all of which are claiming excessive salaries, money which could be spent on patients.

What is wanted is a government health minister to remove all NHS Trust Boards, remove 99 per cent of all NHS managers, most of whom do not even hold a first aid qualification, and put all that money back into each hospital or other health practice and appoint a specialist small health team to run each hospital just as any business owner would do.

The patient is your customer and the more you treat, the more money the government would pay each organisation.

The NHS does not need more money, just the money it receives at present channelled where it is needed, into quality patient care.

R Knight

via email

Appeal

Support Crisis this Christmas

As the cold nights of winter draw in, it becomes more apparent how important home is to us all.

While most of the country will be getting ready to celebrate with loved ones, there will be thousands of people facing the struggle of having nowhere safe to call home.

Many of us will have noticed the rising number of people sleeping on the streets where we live or work. But what we don’t see is that for every person on our streets, there are another 12 families or individuals stuck in unsafe and insecure accommodation. No one should be forced to live, or spend Christmas, this way. That’s why Crisis is running activities for our members over the Christmas period, providing people experiencing homelessness with a range of activities. But we don’t stop there. Our year-round training includes education and support with housing, employment and wellbeing. This long-term support helps people to rebuild their lives and leave homelessness behind for good.

But we can’t do it alone. We’re asking members of the public to help support our work this Christmas and year-round - so we can be there for everyone who needs us. So, please help reserve a place for someone at a Crisis Christmas centre, you’ll be helping to make someone’s wish to end their homelessness a reality.

So, please make a donation to help support our members locally. Together we can end homelessness. To find out more or to donate to Crisis this Christmas, please visit https://www.crisis.org.uk/christmas

Mandy Carlson

Crisis