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Patients and their relatives will welcome the BMA’s representative body chairwoman’s call for spare capacity to cope with the backlog of non Covid-19 cases (Times letters, August 29). If the Secretary of State for Health’s current reform provides an early warning system for a future pandemic, together with a countrywide framework for dealing with it and lines of accountability that are clearer, it could certainly help to diminish the backlog of waiting lists which has exacerbated the present crisis.
But this backlog would not disappear. It already exists as a result of the NHS’s underlying deficiencies. The build-up of waiting lists might be reduced substantially if common clinical conditions were dealt with locally more promptly. For this to happen, each area’s clinical needs would have to be assessed, making good such deficiencies as low staffing, poor training and shortages of up-to-date equipment and/or premises. It would then be possible to work out more accurately what personnel the NHS needs and to decide on how to reduce waste and bureaucracy. A reform of this kind would require the mix of politicians, civil servants, managers and clinicians running the NHS nationally to be re-organised. The BMA, if it aims to eliminate the backlog, might give it its support.
Yours,
Dr Ramon Gardner
Emeritus Consultant Psychiatrist
Addenbooke's Hospital
NHS waiting list
Dear Editor,
Patients and their relatives will welcome the BMA’s representative body chairwoman’s call for spare capacity to cope with the backlog of non Covid-19 cases (Times letters, August 29). If the Secretary of State for Health’s current reform provides an early warning system for a future pandemic, together with a countrywide framework for dealing with it and lines of accountability that are clearer, it could certainly help to diminish the backlog of waiting lists which has exacerbated the present crisis.
But this backlog would not disappear. It already exists as a result of the NHS’s underlying deficiencies. The build-up of waiting lists might be reduced substantially if common clinical conditions were dealt with locally more promptly. For this to happen, each area’s clinical needs would have to be assessed, making good such deficiencies as low staffing, poor training and shortages of up-to-date equipment and/or premises. It would then be possible to work out more accurately what personnel the NHS needs and to decide on how to reduce waste and bureaucracy. A reform of this kind would require the mix of politicians, civil servants, managers and clinicians running the NHS nationally to be re-organised. The BMA, if it aims to eliminate the backlog, might give it its support.
Yours,
Dr Ramon Gardner
Emeritus Consultant Psychiatrist
Addenbooke's Hospital
Competing interests: No competing interests