Letter: Where have the NHS recovery buildings gone?

SIR – It mystifies me why the problems of the health service are not being rectified; it's the system that is wrong.

Hospitals are for people requiring medical treatment. When they do not need treatment, they should be taken to the next stage of either going home or a place that they can be looked after until fit to go home.

Many years ago, I'm sure older readers will remember, there was Fred Wooley House at North Stoneham at the end of the M3, and I always understood this was such a place – so why get rid of it?

It is very laudable saying patients should be taken home, but look at the facts: it takes a lot more carers (who do a brilliant job) but we seem to be paying for half their time travelling from patient to patient. Where's the logic in that?

I had a case a few years ago when my father-in-law had to go into hospital. Twice they sent him home (he lived on his own) too soon. He should have gone into a nursing home but because he had all his faculties he said no, and they had to abide by that.

In the end he did go into a nursing home; into a hospital paid for bed for an initial six weeks, but the number of these beds is very limited and he enjoyed his stay and spent another happy two-and-a-half years there.

So why do they not open more buildings to take patients for recovery, which would make life much easier for social services having them in one building instead of spread around wards in a large hospital, bed-blocking.

They then can go home or to a nursing home.

At the end of the day, this would free up beds in the hospitals, ambulances can discharge their patients more quickly, and when we call an ambulance it arrives in good time as it is not in a queue outside of an A&E.

E. Holtham,

Holbury