A LOT has been written in the press lately regarding the state of the NHS with some inferring it is all down to our ageing population for being alive to reap the benefits of a great organisation that was brought into being in 1948, the year I started work at age fifteen.

I would have been paying my National Insurance stamps as it used to be called as soon as I became eligible to pay.

So I would have contributed in some way for almost fifty years by the time I retired. Lots of my generation would have a similar record.

Since retirement I have had a number of occasions to use their facilities and very glad to have experienced their wonderful services. In my opinion the NHS has now become overstaffed with managers and pen pushers concerned more with hitting spurious targets than patient care.

What we need is someone with a business mind, like Sir Digby Jones, or our own John Elliot, chairman of the Ebac Group Ltd., who, I am sure, would sort out their purchasing department where considerable savings could and would be made in short time. Apart from us all disintegrating when we reach 80 that would be one way of bringing the NHS back into the way it was intended to be - a service for the people.

Doug Porthouse, Ferryhill