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Terence E , Penrith, Cumbria

Agenda For Change was an initative that changed the job descriptions and payscales of all healthcare staff except doctors. Junior doctors such as myself have had yearly pay rises at less than half the rate of inflation for at least the entire duration of this government, despite loss in earnings following decreased out of hours and on call work related to the EWTD.

O Harrison, Huddersfield,

What a good idea Chapman, lets talk to the people not who work in the NHS everyday, are the most affected by AFC/ red tape/ political targets etc. No lets talk to people outside,
"Mr X do you think the increase in the NHS funding has helped deliver better care?."

Keith R, i understand why you may think that, however it's not tha lack of doctors at a weekend that stops people going home (it's not big task to do a TTO and as long as they have been signed off as medically fit) its other factors. We have a ward where at least 4 of our patients have been fit to go home for weeks, there are no secure places or nursing home places to take them.

Working in the NHS from (before medical school) to now has shown me that some aspects have improved beyond belief but that others are worse than i thought they ever could be.
If your acutely ill then an NHS hospital is where you want to be, after that it's a lot more of a gamble.

Damian, Fareham,

The legacy of this government's health policy will be obscene amounts of taxpayers money wasted on ill-thought out initiatives, quangoes and short-termism. The IT botch up (£20 billion) is medicine's Millenium Dome. NHS direct is useless - the staff just advise everyone to attend their local emergency dept., so clogging them up with inappropriate attenders.

Targets distort clinical priorities with managers throwing money at them to acheive them (e.g. employing very expensive extra locum staff during audit periods) or fiddling facts to gloss over failures (e.g. renaming A&E corridors as wards so as not to break the 4 hour rule). Fining 'failing' hospitals is ludicrous as they are the ones that need help and only engenders a culture of fear and deceipt.

Private healthcare and contractors are milking NHS coffers whilst staff are scared of redundacy.

That's right Patricia - Best year ever.

Mark Sandby-Thomas, Cardiff, UK

Great idea, Chapman: Get rid of the doctors! That will make the NHS better. Of course they have a vested interest. What a foolish comment.

D Nethercott (doctor), Manchester, UK

We should begin to transfer over to a Continental-type system in order to provide good healthcare in this country.
The NHS is a political animal - and anything 'free at point of delivery' will get abused. Furthermore, threats are now being made about non-treatment on the NHS if you are fat, or smoke, or play conkers......the whole ethos of the NHS thus destroyed.

Phil, Preston,

Why not survey the customers - the patients? Because that would get a measure on outcome.

Gavin, Harrogate, UK

But are doctors the best people to survey and so are the findings accurate? Surely they have a vested interest and, many would say, are part of the problem. Unbelievable that this survey is touted as it is.

Chapman, Harrogate, UK

The cold dead hand of socialist enslavement works its usual magic, in this case with result being completely demoralized physicians. Be it Cuba, Zimbabwe, East Germany, or the NHS, its always the same result .

How about free market solutions to universal healthcare? Private ownership of privae medical and dental insurance policies, complete elimination of the vast government healthcare bureaucracy, Medical Savings Plans, Health Care buying cooperatives, etc., all encouraged by generous tax deductions.

British doctors and patients have very little to lose by considering these options.

Edward Sodaro MD, Massapequa, NY State/USA

Yes, there have been improvements in waiting times. But this governments idea of choice appears to be to close down smaller local units, and have people from my area travelling up to 60 miles for treatment at an independent unit.
This unit only takes fit patients, and will not train doctors and nurses of the future. So these short waiting lists are at the shortsighted cost of training and healthcare structure.
I think that the "agenda for change" comment regarding medics salaries is misguided. This government has wasted millions on a computer system that is not fit for purpose, where as paying doctors and nurses appropriately is good for morale, and attracts the best clinicians to our shores to provide care for future generations.

Jason Eyre, Leeds,

I,as a doctor(GP),working in a very deprived area of London am fed up with hearing about how much doctors are earning.The truth is that the Govt wanted certain targets to be achieved,they set the payments,we worked hard to try and make sure that we achieved these standards-which the planners had probably thought we couldn't achieve and we end up getting the 'flak'.
The ones who can retire or leave the service probably will and the politicians will probably get what they want-a group of 'salaried doctors' who will work by 'rules' laid down by their managers so we will have the worst of US style medicine without the benefit to the 'consumer' of the General Practitioner who acted as their 'advocate'

k singh, london, uk

I have to declare an interest as being a retired Health professional, but not in a direct clinical field. I have no issue with the foregoing comments, and am hugely encouraged to see the reported survey results, from the younger doctors, and with which I am minded to generally agree.
Perhaps an overlooked Doctor role is in the fact that it is the decisions of the clinician which cause the expenditure = to operate or not, to treat with costly or cheaper drugs, to keep in hospital another day, or to have discharged the patient yesterday. Why is no patient discharged home on a Sunday? Probable answer = no competent/acceptable doctor available to so decide.
Now, as in "Yes Minister", if it were not for patients, then it would be an easy service to provide.....and also without the doctors of course. But I bet somebody would still be employed.

Keith R. Jones, Nottingham, UK

Most of that money went towards Agenda for Change. Are those doctors saying their huge pay increases was not money well spent?

C Radley, Basildon,

It is a sad state of affairs when Blair and Brown fail to respond to critisisms regarding the failures of their NHS 'reforms', replying along the lines of "... This Government has invested £X billion into the NHS".

With this £X billion pumped into the NHS, what specifically has been improved? What tangible benefits have we seen?

Alex, London, UK

The findings may well be at least partly correct but are doctors the best people to survey? Doctors have a vested interest and are part of the problem, surely.

Chapman, Harrogate, UK

I am one of the benefectors of the NHS after I had an emergency operation carried out to have my aortic valve replaced in 2004. Without NHS, I wouldn't be here writing. Whilst I was an impatient, every aspects were taken care of by the hospital medical staff. The saddest thing is that once I was discharged from the hospital, the care provided by the PCT has gone downhill. The Government spent so much funds to promite the PCT, but the same care can be provided by the same hospital who treated me in the first place. I believe the funds spent on the PCT are so wasteful of limited resources.

We all should give this Government credits to improve the NHS but to be more critical to the departments who run the NHS.

M.T. Teong, London,

Disillusioned doctors? Think how the patients have felt for ten years.

John Johnston, Cambridgeshire, UK

Disillusioned doctors? Think how the patients have felt for ten years.

jj, Cambridgeshire, UK

Doctors and schoolteachers are renowned for their tendency to become at least slightly pompous as an inevitable result of their positions of enormous dominance over their charges. This contributes to their anoyance with anyone having the temerity to do anything other than provide large sums of money with which they are left freely to spend.
This poll at least partly expresses doctors exasperation with the various attempts to manage our £90Billion health Service, but also as suggested in your Leader because they are comparing the present day NHS with some imaginary golden past.
As an elderly person very dependent on the Health Service I cannot begin to understand how 56% of doctors apparently do not believe there has been any improvement since 2002. I think it has been transformed both at the GP level, with greatly improved surgeries and elimination of waiting time to see my own doctor, and at hospital where I am impressed with masses of high tech equipement and short waiting times.

Don Nicholas, Rugby, Warks

Those of us old enough to remember the age of the 'family doctor', a respected friend who was always there in the background even when one was not ill, can only mourn his passing. I have never felt so uncared for as I do now - and money will not cure this aspect of the failure of the NHS. I think doctors should acknowledge their own responsibility for this aspect - the most important aspect - of the situation we find ourselves in. Another point I should like to make re which services should come under the NHS. I think the NHS should look after people who are ill: that is, all services like IVF, abortion, contraceptives and the like should be paid for by those who want them and doctors should concentrate their research and their skills in fighting illness.

A J McCabe, Doncaster,

The government was warned that no robust mechanisms were in place to spend efficiently the billions of pounds of tax payers' money which it proposed to inject. It ignored these warnings, went ahead and threw money at the NHS anyway and ended up wasting it.

ubidenmark, Edinburgh, UK

The problems with the NHS are not simply financial. From a patient point of view the central problem is now one of trust: The DoH has placed a filter across the doctor-patient relationship which skews treatment to the diktat of central planning, as in: score points, get profits!

For example: cholesterol. The bovine-spongiform heads at the DoH want to abolish it. So everyone over a certain age gets forced onto it. The controversy about cholesterol - and statins - is carefully covered up; the people administering the scheme are barely trained, and side-effects are the fault of the patient.

It's Rousseau's 'General Will' in action.

We need the DoH off our backs, and out of our lives.

Hugh Bartholomew, Blackpool, U.K.

We hgave come to expect that the NHS can and should treat, and if possible cure, every condition, regardless of cost and benefit and are increasingly willing to sue if it doesn't. This attitude has to be changed or the NHS will bankrupt us. Hard choices have to be made about what the NHS will provide and, more important, what it cannot and will not provide. Does anyone have the courage to make and stand up for these decisions?

Stephen Warren, Odessa, Ukraine

Disillusioned doctors say Labour decade of reform has failed NHS
Most doctors believe that Labour has failed to reform the NHS and that funding by taxation alone will not improve the quality of care.
Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor
Nigel so what is your say? We will decide from there you area reporter not the politician not the doctor. What do you feel?
I will take this from thereon.
If Labour has failed have the doctors succeeded? I see both these failed. Why blame one

Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD, Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania

This response from doctors is to be expected. They enjoy the current situation, much autonomy and the ability to work in the NHS while pursuing a private practice. They don’t want change. I suspect any change would be resisted.

Having said that it is clear that much money has been wasted.

I believe the NHS to be fundamentally flawed. The sooner we move to an insurance / private supplier based approach, with the state as insurer of last resort , the better.

David, camberley,

Will doctors and people generally never tumble to the crucial truth that the NHS is a fundamentally flawed structure; it is not fit for purpose. Instead of stubbornly clinging to this one and only such scheme in the world, reforms should take place taking up the best systems from round the world.
I worked as a GP principal for 35 years and for almost the whole time I was of this opinion but labelled an oddball in consequence.
Wake up everybody.

Dr J. Findlater, Carnforth,

I am not sure why, whenever alternative funding of healthcare is suggested, the immediate comparison is with the USA. I have spent most of my working life, until recently, in Switzerland and Japan, both countries in which the healthcare system is insurance-based. In both countries healthcare is immediate and facilities are first class. The concept of waiting for treatment is not understood. For those on low incomes there is government support and at one stage I took out insurance in the prefectural system for my family in Japan at a minimal rate. In neither country are people left without care and there are certainly not people dying in the streets as detractors of insurance-based systems would have us believe. If one has to wait for a bed there are not enough beds, and the NHS clearly does not have enough beds or sufficient facilities to cope with modern demands. It is time we stopped this obsession with a monolithic healthcare system in the UK.

Peter, Cambridge,

This seems to confirm that the goverment has undermined the very foundation of the NHS, with more funding going to the private sector which shows their real ambition is to abolish the NHS in favour of the USA pay as you are treated system.

We can only hope that the NHS can still be saved and with the right people at the helm, maybe it can! Those people being the doctors, nurses and other medical staff, not the myriad of over-paid pen pushers who currently oversee the NHS.

Les, Southport, England