Dozens of communities are fighting their own individual battles for the NHS, usually against the downgrading of services at their local hospital. It is frustrating that these valiant groups have never been brought together as a national campaign, but we don’t have a single powerful voice or household name regularly fighting our corner. What we need is leadership. This is why I am appealing to Jeremy Corbyn to commit every Labour MP to attending the second reading of Caroline Lucas’s NHS bill, on 11 March, which aims to repeal the Health and Social Care Act of 2012. If this event passes us by I fear that the NHS as we have known it may be lost for ever. Only Mr Corbyn can make sure this is a big day for the NHS. A petition calling on Jeremy Corbyn to support the NHS bill is at 38degrees.org.uk.
Geoff Small
Stafford
• How many people die each year? Most leave an estate from a few hundred pounds to millions. How much would 10% of that raise annually for the NHS and social care (Report, 19 January)? This idea was mooted a few years ago, mocked as the death tax, and killed off. Resurrect it. Tax all estates and use the hypothecated funds to invigorate the NHS and social care.
Tom Cowin
Hingham, Norfolk
• Could the problems of bed-blocking in hospitals be connected to the fact that we have roughly half the number of beds per capita that they have in France, or one-third the number they have in Germany?
David Barnard
Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire
• I agree, a sugar tax should be introduced (Report, 18 January), but only if it is part of a multifaceted approach. Instead of hospitals focusing on sickness, they should move increasingly into health promotion, beyond their responsibility for providing clinical and curative services. Health promoting hospitals will have benefits for patients, staff and the local community.
Michael Craig Watson
Associate professor of public health, University of Nottingham
• Your interviews (18 January) missed an important voluntary worker. Teddy spent six months in a large teaching hospital in Leeds with my eight-year-old granddaughter. Unfortunately, being very small, Teddy was gathered up with the dirty sheets and taken a long distance to where the laundry was outsourced, survived a boil wash, and was brought back by a senior member of the hospital staff and dressed in miniature hospital scrubs.
Muriel Tucker
Leeds
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