The greater the number of A&E patients, the longer it will take to treat them - Yorkshire Post letters

WHY this never-ending obsession with targets for patients to be seen within four hours (The Yorkshire Post, March 2)? I have always thought that the use of percentages in this context is almost meaningless; it is the actual number of patients dealt with that matters.

Bear in mind that an A&E department does not know how many potential patients will turn up at any given time, nor what the medical problems will be, so why should a fixed percentage target for treatment apply?

Consider a simple example. Suppose that 100 potential patients turned up at a particular A&E department during a four-hour period and that it proved possible for the staff to treat 96 of them. Wonderful! Marvellous! We have beaten the 95 per cent target.

However, on another busier occasion, 200 potential patients arrived during a four-hour period and, again, the same number of staff managed to deal with 96 of them. How absolutely terrible! Abject failure! We have only reached 48 per cent.

The conclusion is always the same. Given a fixed number of medical staff available, the greater the number of patients, the longer it will take to deal with these patients. Common sense should prevail but it rarely does.

From: Phil Hanson, Beechmount Close, Baildon, Shipley.

WELL done to Jayne Dowle (The Yorkshire Post, February 28) for raising the care crisis. With our improving lifestyles and health education, there comes a greater number of aged who require care.

Where I disagree with the politicians of most, if not all parties, is the whole means of funding care. Currently the same old ideas of taking from one part of society and handing to another clearly fails, it fails because it means there will always be losers.

The time has come for a much bigger view to be taken of the present ways of working and how technology can, and must, be adopted to allow funds to be directed to where the current and future demands of society will be met.

A good example is people working as they did in Victorian times travelling from home to do work in cities and then working using IT systems, what a contrast! It is surprising that these workers don’t wear top hats or bowlers just to complete the picture! If the Government had a strategy to encourage companies and employees to become home-based workers, the need to spend vast sums on upgrading transport networks could be reduced and even avoided.

Currently we have the HS2 programme with spiralling monetary and environmental impacts for what real benefit? Similarly the local train services are often reported to be approaching third world standard.

Time to free up money, improve the environment and create the funding to reward and encourage the best into care services, it is 2019 not 1819!

Grayling and HS2 must go

From: Janet Berry, Barfield, Hambleton.

CHRIS Grayling must go, as must HS2. Foreign aid must be cut drastically. Shamima Begum must not be allowed into this country. We must leave the EU as promised on March 29. This is what the people want. Strong government, brave decisions.

Please do it. The public feel unsettled, worried and totally misled.

You do not reward failure by increasing salaries of MPs by £2,000. It makes us very angry.

From: Jarvis Browning, Main Street, Fadmoor, York.

THE Transport Secretary should be kicked out from his department, how dare he spend that amount of money, which the Government says they have not got for other departments, on botched Brexit deals. Yet MPs still get a pay rise! An utter mess and a disgrace.

Who decides on billions?

From: ME Wright, Harrogate.

AS an RBS (ex-Williams & Glyns) customer, I was not impressed by the admission of Sir Howard Davies that the Government – i.e we the public – are unlikely to get back all the £45.5bn used to bail them out (David Behrens, The Yorkshire Post, March 2).

Sir Howard might well be right, but doesn’t the final decision rest with the Government?

In the same issue, we read that, true to form, Chris Grayling has thrown a needless £33m to Eurostar, accompanied by a National Audit report that his flawed probation reforms are set to cost us £500m.

We’re told that his birthday is April 1; but aren’t we the fools if we let him and RBS get away with this?

Anti-Semitism is no surprise

From: Ralph Lennard, Plantation Gardens, Leeds.

HOW strange that 
anti-Semitism has reared its 
ugly head in the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn, and not 
under his predecessors Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband.

But what do you expect under a man who associates himself with Hamas and Hezbollah?

How many more deaths?

From: Peter Hyde, Driffield.

JUST how many more 
youngsters have to die from being stabbed before the Government sees that the 
whole debacle has been caused 
through them cutting police numbers and shortening, and in some cases, dropping prison sentences altogether?

It is time for the Government to get real and give us the police and justice system that we so desperately need.