Letter: Our health service in Northern Ireland needs major reform, not simply more cash

In fact, anyone looking at the photograph of those giving the briefing (with the exception of the ambulance service representative) would get a clue as to one of the main problems causing the ongoing historic and extremely serious issues very adversely damaging our health service here in Northern Ireland.

I refer, of course, to the quite unnecessary number of boards, trusts, and thus administrators, managers, chairmen, chief executives and so on, call them what you like, who as well as being excessive in number are in my view largely incompetent.

We require to reorganise the whole system rather like what happened with education, where we quite appropriately did away with boards and trusts and appointed one chief executive to be responsible for the running of a system in a country of less than two million people.

To allow the health service to continue in its present state will be criminal and a total insult to all our citizens and also, of course, to our magnificent doctors, nurses and associated staff who look after us so well and against all the odds.

Procurement in the health service is also a major concern and the ineptitude there, resulting in the squandering of vast amounts of money, requires major review as well.

Simply throwing money at this problem is most definitely not the answer and by revamping the whole service some of the money saved could be more properly used to pay our doctors, nurses and others properly and improve their working conditions.

In conclusion, part of any reform would most definitely also require the abolishing of the totally unnecessary and vastly expensive health and social care board, an organisation which appears to be for salvaging the lacklustre careers of those who had previously had jobs within our health service.

Jack Irwin, Bangor, Co Down

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