Health secretary Matt Hancock

• YOUR report on the NHS, (Health Secretary Matt Hancock gives out wrong figures on Royal Free staffing, December 12), raises useful issues but misses the point.

It is not a matter of whether we have 900 or 252 more nurses; the trouble with our health service is that it is, largely, a disease service. Except for a few areas of good work, its policy is to wait for patients to become ill and then attempt to fix them up, usually relatively expensively.

Tinyurl.com/healthchecknhs points to an area of supreme excellence, the five-yearly, MOT-type, check-ups for people over 40; but a recent freedom of information request reveals that after over two years of being led round the houses, we get the result that 82.4 per cent of patients are being ignored.

This utterly disgraceful result brings shame on the GP profession. If there are significant cost issues, then these must be addressed; otherwise, with a combination of stick and carrot, doctors must be made to fulfil their duty and save us all a great deal of illness and suffering. And the NHS an even greater deal of money.

Every GP in the borough now has an extra new year’s resolution.

PETER RUTHERFORD, NW6