YOUR report (“Cash Crisis at Hospital” June 16), in addition to emphasising the gravity of the hospital’s financial position, touched on several other issues.

First, while new ways of providing effective healthcare might prove cheaper than current practices – we would need to know a lot more – these will not address the basic problem.

Second, the crisis is not merely local but national. There is no point, therefore, in looking for local scapegoats and little point in looking for merely local solutions.

Third, Michel Hooper-Immins asks, “Is the NHS underfunded?” This is clearly a rhetorical question: it is obviously underfunded, to an increasingly dangerous degree.

Medical professionals rightly do their best to serve their patients even under increasingly unhelpful conditions. I wish, however, that more of them would abandon the public use of the government’s propaganda “overspending” and refer more accurately to “underfunding”. The money is spent on clinical need, not on fripperies.

If the present government had made a manifesto commitment to balancing the NHS’s books through killing thousands of people prematurely by delayed or inadequate healthcare, one likes to think that they would not have been elected.

That, however, appears to be the stark truth beneath the blander promises.

Barry Tempest

Romulus Close

Dorchester