Letter

No gloss, please

Dear healthmatters -- First, may I congratulate you on publishing the only magazine in the country which takes an intelligent, well-informed view of current health issues. The quality of debate in your pages is consistently good, and the quality of the magazine itself is excellent.

Having said that, I must express strong disagreement with much of Paul Martin’s article (Will we still recognise the NHS in 1997?, issue 11) in your last issue. I really don’t think the claim that the Conservatives are ‘demonstrating how to improve the public services with an emphasis on efficiency, choice and quality’ can be allowed to stand.

Sure, the piles of glossy literature being pumped out of Richmond House on a daily basis may be trying to persuade us that this is the case, but where is the evidence? Waiting lists overall have lengthened despite the hype, the proportion of the NHS budget spent on administration and ‘management consultants’ has soared, beds and hospitals continue to close, certain health authorities refuse to pay for proven treatments, patients of fundholding GPs are pushed to the front of the queues while others have to wait, staff are forced to accept deteriorating conditions of employment (as the adjacent article Sorry, no work today nurse highlighted)... the list goes on.

When the history of this period of health policy comes to be written, it will be interesting to see whether ‘bureaucracy, restriction and cost-cutting’ seem more appropriate adjectives than ‘efficiency, choice and quality’.