Letters August 20: Prescription for an NHS driven by a vocation to care

I HAVE just read the article by Dr Ian Wilson of the British Medical Association in which he accuses the Government of undermining and alienating doctors and nurses (The Yorkshire Post, August 17).

Jeremy Hunt is doing his very best to help doctors and nurses to rekindle their vocation in caring for their patients; that means looking after your patients seven days a week night and day.

Because of the European Work Directive, doctors and nurses are only paid for 48 hours per week. The extra hours that doctors or nurses have to work is done by agency doctors or nurses, costing the NHS many millions of pounds. This extra hard work they do is generously paid for. In many cases doctors can earn thousands of pounds in one weekend. Even doctors in training are doing agency work. France and Germany do not take a blind bit of notice of this Directive; they pay doctors for the work they do.

A half to a third of hospital beds have been closed, this means that the nurses who ran these wards have lost their jobs. A&E departments are crammed full of patients because there are not enough beds. Patients even have to wait in ambulances outside A&E departments. The solution is to open the ward doors again and re-employ former nurses.

Medical students have to spend a short time in a GP practice and what they see is so depressing that they do not wish to go into general practice. GPs must stop being just a referral service and writers of prescriptions. They must become specialists; covering the main medical and surgical conditions so that they can refer patients to each other for diagnosis and treatment, rather than all patients having to go to A&E or be referred to hospital.

It is not the function of the Government to run the NHS, but it is the function of NHS England and the doctors and nurses working in the NHS.

Many millions of pounds can be saved by reducing the number of managers in the NHS. They now outnumber the doctors and are on enormous salaries.

There is no organisation in this country that has such a highly trained workforce in their doctors and nurses, who are quite capable of running the various departments in the NHS without interference from managers.

To paraphrase President J F Kennedy; ask not what can my government do for the NHS but what can I do for the NHS.