Health service

Florence Nightingale rides again.

When is a cutback not a cutback? From being a Third World health nation, we are now relegated to the fourth division. What next? Bring your own sleeping bags as the beds have been reduced by a third. Just for good measure, try not to die at the weekend as we have no staff. A new airport should be built as a taxi to Outer Mongolia as that is the destination we will be taking to have our gall stones removed.

This is the health board managers’ conception of cost-cutting: Shift the problem to another land at huge cost. Why not run crash courses in self operations so you can remove your own organs and sew yourself back up again, thus sparing that poor consultant the indignity of having to work on a medical card holder, when he would prefer to be operating on the lucrative cash customer?