You point to the emergence of a two-tiered NHS (Private healthcare boom adds to fears of two-tier system in UK, 2 March). This of course reflects the direction of travel over many years, starting with the establishment of an “internal market” in the early 1980s, the ongoing outsourcing to private providers and reports that in recent parliaments, dozens of MPs or lords have had shares in private healthcare companies.
Recently, a former colleague of mine, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist in central London, was describing the struggle to maintain a service that was often one and sometimes two consultants down, leaving her to cope on her own.
While she is managing these pressures, she receives regular unsolicited enticements from private psychiatric hospitals in the UK, inviting her to join them at more than double her salary. We are witnessing the driven and organised dismemberment of what has arguably been, for over 70 years, the world’s most successful socialist institution.
Dr Derek Summerfield
London
• The government’s decision to cut the number of people in England who get free winter flu jabs may well be to save money (Report, 4 March). But given that we are still free to pay for our own flu jabs should we wish, this is yet another drip, drip means of getting us used to paying for our healthcare and helping the surreptitious privatisation of the health system.
Gary Bennett
Exeter
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