THE pressures on the NHS have been forecast – even writ large – for many years and yet there are those in authority who express surprise at the queues at the A&E doors, at the unsafe levels of bed occupancy, at the lack of qualified potential recruits for the critical number of staff vacancies.

In Shropshire, we see both Shrewsbury and Telford hospital beds occupied at 95 to 100 per cent (the NHS safe limit is 85%) and routine elective surgery being cancelled due to lack of beds for patients and still the old bogey man of “bed blocking” because discharges are delayed until social care or other safe transfer packages can be arranged.

Meanwhile our community hospitals, where there is some spare capacity to ease the bed-blocking problem, could offer some solution.

Inability to recruit the necessary staff will be trotted out as the perennial excuse or reason why these facilities cannot be returned to service – but who in authority decided to end the bursary system for trainee nurses at such a critical time?

The result is clear – a massive drop in the number of trainees this year which will impact in two or three years time, by which time we will have poached the entire trained nurse population from some overseas countries at some considerable expense.

Is there no joined-up thinking in Whitehall, or even in the Department for Health, that is able to recognise a flash of the obvious?

The old Ludlow Town Hospital used to have a lead doctor, a matron and a treasurer and provided a wide range of operations locally – not so today.

Sadly the over-managed NHS has developed a voracious appetite for money that does not benefit the front-line.

This is not only tragically wrong – regrettably it is becoming terminal!