IS ANDREW Martin serious? (Tuesday, January 24).

Medicine is a quickly-developing discipline, and revalidation is a means of ensuring that doctors continuing past a normal retirement age have maintained up-todate skills.

Would he really have it otherwise?

His earlier letter was full of error.

The EU Working Hours Directive does not apply to GPs on at least two grounds, and if he can find a full-time GP doing a fiveday, 48-hour week, he should let us know: it would be a collectors’ item.

The Working Hours Directive does apply to junior hospital doctors: personally, I am grateful that, if I turn up in casualty with a difficult-todiagnose and potentially fatal condition, I shall not be seen by someone coming to the end of a sixty-hour session, as used to be possible.

He also suggested earlier that nurses could be upgraded to fulfil doctors’ roles.

In fact, many nurses have been, quite properly, upgraded to perform functions that used to be the reserve of doctors, but is he seriously suggesting that the roles are so close that a simple administrative tweak would bridge the gap?

The real cause of the current problems is that successive governments – not only but most significantly those in power since 2010 as we approached the current crisis – have failed to prepare for what was clearly foreseen.

Producing more doctors is not achieved quickly.

And it is not just GPs that are in short supply: many other medical disciplines are also struggling, and almost all hospitals in the country on a recent survey reported nursing shortages which they estimated potentially put patients at risk.

Other ancillary but important technical staff are also in many cases difficult to appoint (where the money is available to appoint them).

BARRY TEMPEST

Romulus Close Dorchester

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