LETTER: Labour opened floodgates to NHS downfall

Highlighted over the news and in this paper to do with our NHS.=
The number of staff off sick at the Royal Preston and Chorley and South Ribble Hospitals is on the rise.The number of staff off sick at the Royal Preston and Chorley and South Ribble Hospitals is on the rise.
The number of staff off sick at the Royal Preston and Chorley and South Ribble Hospitals is on the rise.

First of all, let me take you all back to 2009 when Labour was in power. They allowed PFI to participate more in our NHS, but now Labour is raising its voice about how the current government is running our NHS in to the ground and slowly selling it off to private interests.

But Labour started opening the flood gates with jobs being cut, and the money for the NHS being slashed, so what gives Labour the right to complain now?

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I told Labour on many occasions that the Conservatives would take advantage of the present they had land in their laps.

Secondly, this government has promised in the last three years that it would look at the NHS and its budgets and they would put real money in, in real terms, but if you can recall the government’s own statistics stated that the NHS was still billions in debt. This is the crunch of it all.

Thirdly, Pinderfields Hospital is complaining about people smoking in front of the hospital and how it was effecting patients.

Well for one thing, any smoke that is released outside is dispersed by the breezes and winds before it gets time to accumulate in to a thick enough cloud to bother patients in hospital, but has the hospital looked at the amount of cars, vans, buses, and ambulances that go by or pull up with the engines running?

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Number four - Pinderfields is run by the NHS, as are all the hospitals, but the NHS is owned by the people that use it through their contributions.

They pay each week or each month out of their wages and smokers are part of these people - and they pay twice, once through their wages and the second time through the surcharge the government puts on all tobacco products.

This was to deal with smokers to save them using the budget of the NHS.

P D Roper, via email