It's a shambles (From Malvern Gazette)

It's a shambles

10:29am Friday 31st August 2007 in Letters

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always understood NHS to stand for National Health Service; the same health care for everyone, everywhere.

With almost daily news that Ambulance Control Centres, A&E and maternity units are on the brink of closure, it's rapidly degenerating into a Near Hopeless Shambles.

Senior administration within the health authority are more concerned with running the service solely as a business, meeting targets and making savings by the easiest means possible.

There is a great danger that we are rapidly moving toward the provision of health care run on the principal of the law of diminishing returns, where all effort is expended on securing 80% of the available market, while the remaining 20% is ignored. This is all too apparent in the proposed closure of the Bransford Ambulance Control Centre and expansion of Brierly Hill.

Resources will undoubtedly be sucked in to the more densely populated areas in the West Midlands in order to serve the 80%' and achieve Government targets, while the remaining 20%' of rural Herefordshire and Worcestershire is left woefully short of cover.

West Midlands Ambulance Service has an obligation to provide an effective, resilient service; it must not be allowed to do this to the benefit of some, but to the clear detriment of others.

R.N. Prosser, Brook Farm Drive, Malvern.