NHS is worth caring for

MOST British people cherish the NHS. However, we must have sensible public discussions about its future.

Perhaps my personal experience will illustrate one aspect of the problem. In 1946, when the NHS was founded, the then Minister for Health defined its duty as being….

...to promote the establishment in England and Wales of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people of England and Wales and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness, and for that purpose to provide or secure the effective provision of services in accordance with the following provisions of this Act.

So, the prevention of illness was enshrined from the outset.

Nowhere, however, does the Act codify as an aim of the NHS the prevention or ‘cure’ of death.

In January of 2008, I suffered a complete cardiac block; whereby the electrical supply needed to initiate a heartbeat was blocked. When I was born in 1952, such an episode would probably have led to my death: end of expenditure for the NHS.

Because it happened in 2008, a small CRD was implanted in my chest: start of expenditure for the NHS. I can now continue to enjoy life and the concomitant chronic illnesses which accompany increasing age.

The NHS was founded at a time when we had a naïve concept of illness as a sequence of discrete episodes. We were only just starting to become aware of the concept of chronic disease as a constant companion in old age. Instead of cure, our attention has frequently switched to management of a condition.

We must differentiate the need for social care from the need for acute care.

The NHS was never intended to provide social care: but to “prevent, diagnose, and treat illness”. Such an insight would enable those we elect to govern us to look anew at the whole concept for the funding of social care. Not even separate insurance arrangements should be ruled out.

Mark Dyer, Blackburn

Joe Public can’t trust Tories

WHEN writing to this newspaper, I do not normally mention the writer whose views I am opposing in the hope that they will recognise themselves and avoid confrontation.

However, I must say how very annoyed I was to read Gordon Bennetti’s letter in which he concludes that any supporter of the Labour Party must be a past or failed politician.

I can assure him that I am neither.

I am the ordinary Joe Public to which he refers, one who does not trust the Tories any further than he can throw them, which at my age is not very far.

Whilst this country remains the one with the biggest difference in Europe between the rich and poor, with struggling schools and hospitals, and fat cats getting ever fatter I shall retain that opinion.

Clive Blackmore, Blackburn

Racing to a cruel death

TEN years ago, this month, Animal Aid launched a new initiative, entitled Race Horse Deathwatch. The aim of the project was to monitor and publish detailed information on as many on-course race horse deaths as we could find out about, because the racing industry did not do so.

Ten years on, little has changed. Racing’s regulator, the British Horseracing Authority, merely publishes the number of horses killed whilst racing, and not the names of the horses or how they died.

Animal Aid, however, does.

The names of 1,500 horses, killed as a result of racing in the last decade, appear on the Race Horse Deathwatch website, but the true figure is likely to be much greater.

The majority of those horses were killed after breaking their leg, or neck, while racing, or because they collapsed and died.

This shocking number of fatalities is racing’s dirty secret. We continue our work to expose it – on behalf of all those horses who had nobody to speak out for them.

Fiona Pereira, Animal Aid