Restructuring of the NHS is essential, but the task needs to be taken out of the political arena and placed with a royal commission of experts

Every year millions of pounds are poured into the NHS. Every year there is a winter health crisis and every year the health service is kicked around as a political football by every political party.

Before the NHS was established, healthcare for the majority in the UK was at best patchy and at worst unaffordable and nonexistent, with women, children and the elderly suffering the most. Its founder, Aneurin Bevan, envisaged that in time the establishment of the NHS would improve the nation’s health and that the demand for its services would decrease; the opposite has happened. Currently about 40% of all health problems are as a result of lifestyle choices. Added to this is an ageing population with accompanying health and social care needs.

It is clear that the NHS in its present form is not fit for purpose and that long-term planning and restructuring are required.

It is also clear that this task is too important for the short-term vision of all the political parties. We need this to be taken out of the political arena and placed with a royal commission made up of experts in the fields of medicine and health and social care, who would be charged with planning a national health service for the next 30 or more years, not the current five-year political cycle.

Paul Lewis

Edinburgh

How strange that the left seems to have discovered there are serious health inequalities in this country (“Huge health gap revealed between UK’s rich and poor”, News, 24 December). Didn’t anyone notice the excellent report by Sir Douglas Black released in 1980 that pointed out the severe health inequalities in this country that pretty much reflect the other unacceptable social inequalities?

If the left had concentrated on dealing with the important issues raised in that report of the type that seriously affect the lives of working-class people (remember them?), particularly when it held power for 13 years, then maybe it wouldn’t be having to deal with the collective psychological trauma seemingly inflicted by the Brexit vote.

It might also be useful to see if the proportion of genuinely working-class young people studying medicine has changed significantly since 1980. Growing up in disadvantaged circumstances should make people more aware that nutrition, housing and life opportunities are more likely to create health inequalities than expensive machines that go “ping”.

Michael Dillon

Sheerness

Kent

Politicians are so lacking in integrity that they will just not admit that mass immigration and the population explosion is to blame for the breakdown in our public services. They find it easier to blame “an ageing population”, which we have always had. The fact is with a population explosion there are of course contained in that population more elderly people as there are also more babies.

Politicians don’t seem to have the intelligence to work this out. They are smearing elderly people to cover for their immigration and other mistakes. Blair, for example, should have increased public services facilities to meet the additional demand from millions of additional people.

Douglas J Wathen

Oakfields

Worcestershire