Trust and demand

Last week's Editor's Choice argued that health care was too important to be left to politicians and that Britain's National Health Service should be made independent of government. This week 900 British doctors have written to politicians to argue that the NHS is unsustainable and that it is time to look at new ways of delivering health care in the UK (p 813). What prompts this demand for new thinking is the service's financial crisis, which is seeing pay awards staged and jobs cut (p 813). Yet I wonder how apparent the crisis is to patients: several recent exposures …