While I am pleased that Ruth Marr had good experiences with the NHS, I feel compelled to put my oar into this discussion (Our NHS is rising to the challenges, Letters, February 19). I worked in front line NHS services for 40 years, and for at least the last 20 of these, there was underfunding, understaffing and under-resourcing. The reasons for this are multiple, and include the much greater complexity of care and treatments available; the increased survival of older people; failure to train enough of our own doctors and nurses and so on.

While I agree that most NHS staff pull out the stops to make patients' care excellent and timeous, their ability to do this consistently in every area of the service is severely constrained by inadequate resources. While each government has promised "better care", none has succeeded. While each claims a real-term increase in funding, this in no way covers the increasing cost of running our NHS, and year-on-year 3-5% savings have to be made by each health board. How do they make these savings? Only by trimming staff or other resources. And each successive government claims that "this will not reduce the service, but we will make the service more targeted and efficient, so that the patient experience is better". This is code for "we actually can't make it better, but we'll try to pull the wool over your eyes meanwhile".

I'm sorry to sound so negative, but the above is the truth. While there are more efficient ways, they have usually been already put in place, and I personally witnessed countless situations where wards, departments, theatres etc were working with insufficient staffing of every kind, and insufficient resources in terms of space, equipment and so on. This always results in patient-care suffering, while the staff are put under increased stress and strain.

I offer two solutions. 1. Take the NHS out of political hands altogether. It has been used as a political football by every government, always to the detriment of care. 2. As people from one of the wealthiest nations in the world, we need to be prepared to give considerably more of our relative wealth and put it into out public services, including the NHS. Only this will allow the NHS to blossom, with adequate staffing and resourcing. It only comes at a cost, and we should be more than willing to pay that cost by a significant increase in our taxes.

The trouble is, that no political party is willing to propose this. Instead we tinker around at the margins while the NHS Titanic sinks slowly and inexorably further into the realms of poor care in many, many areas, despite desperate measures by loyal, hard-working NHS staff who end up totally demoralised and discouraged.

I am glad that Ruth Marr had such good care, but countless others have not, instead waiting months, sometimes years for their appointments or treatment. We must not pretend that "all is well", for it is certainly not.

Alasdair HB Fyfe

Glasgow