THERE have been a number of letters in The Bolton News recently regarding the NHS and the massive cuts which are having to be made.

The NHS is a national treasure which I would gladly pay more for if it meant keeping it in the public domain rather than becoming privatised.

However, there does seem to be a great deal of waste within the system ie: millions of pounds spent on a new computerised records system which was found to be unusable. More recently, disclosures have revealed that £500 million was spent on stockpiling supplies of Tamiflu in anticipation of a swine flu pandemic which never happened.

Last year I watched the television programme “The Secret Millionaire”, featuring a former NHS nurse who had given up nursing and had set up a business supplying the NHS, in the process of which she had become a millionairess. Does this not show that the NHS is being grossly overcharged?

Recently, there was a case of a dentist who had swindled the NHS out of £2 million — an isolated case, but, nevertheless, the service cannot afford to lose large sums of money like this. While such errors and abuses are happening, staff are being made redundant and we all suffer.

Anne Scott Dewhurst Road Harwood