HELEN SMITH (HAS, Feb 13) writes from the heart about the National Health Service.

She asks that cottage hospitals and A&E departments should remain open in the interests of patients and that front-line staff should be better paid.

I’ve been a hospital governor and seen it from the inside, I believe that the problems are non-medical bureaucrats and self-interested outsiders.

The burden of bureaucracy is crazy, imposed largely from the centre by paper-pushers who are only interested in measuring what they don’t understand.

At least one layer of management could be stripped out, a quick look at the North Durham Clinical Commissioning Group governing body shows that it is largely medical practitioners. Fair enough, you may say, but this body allocates funds to the privately-owned local GPs practices and pays the local hospitals for their work.

These bodies seem ripe for removal, there are already plenty of NHS departments to do their work, even possibly, the hospitals.

As our country is governed, there is only a certain amount of taxpayer income.

So more for the NHS means less for other priorities or higher taxes.

More borrowing is a big no-no, the country’s debts are already frightening and must be reduced. The tax load is already bad and stifling investment, shifting taxation to local councils doesn’t help the patients.

For those who oppose NHS nationalisation, can I point out that most GP surgeries are already privately owned, commonly by the GPs themselves.

Pharmaceutical supply companies are all privately owned and the hospital trusts are almost self-governing, just suffering from excessive regulation.

The problem for the service is to get rid of civil service bureaucracy and to stop excessive profiteering by private suppliers.

This is the only way forward to avoid the NHS absorbing more and more of our taxes.

Anthony Foster, Peterlee