Concerns over the NHS will be addressed after a Yes victory

The first is the claim by the No campaign that Scottish indepen­dence would lead to greater diffi­culties in accessing NHS services in England. This is not true.

My daughter was treated in both the Sick Kids Hospital in Edinburgh and the Teenage Cancer Unit in the Great North Children's Hospital in Newcastle. There was no charge for her treatment or our accommodation and travel from Kinross during the two months that we were attending the hospital in Newcastle. We were assured by NHS staff in Newcastle that the same would apply if Scotland was an independent country. This has been confirmed more recently by Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, the other main treatment centre in England for young persons with cancer. This resulted in the No campaign having to remove misleading advertising which suggested that independence would create barriers to specialist hospital treatment in England.

The second problem is inter­national trade agreements. These include the relationship between private and public sector interests. Today there is powerful lobbying on the UK Government by private American insurance and health companies to secure access to public services in the UK. So, however much the Scottish Government may wish to restrain private sector intrusion into our public services that could be overridden by UK Government trade agreements that force Scottish public services to be put out to private sector tendering. While the private sector may well have a role to play in Scotland's NHS I do not accept that the scale and scope of that role should be determined by the UK Government and its private sector allies in the US, instead of the Scottish Government.

Finally, while Dr Gregor correctly emphasises that Scotland's NHS is fully devolved and therefore subject to Scottish priorities, she omits to mention that the existing block grant and Barnett formula leaves the UK Government in overall control of the total budget allocation to the NHS and therefore exposed to austerity measures which Scotland does not support. Perhaps, therefore, when Dr Gregor complains about "politicians and clinicians scare­mongering" she will also recognise that all of the above problems will be addressed in an independent Scotland in which the NHS is fully protected within a written constitution.

Anne Macintyre,

2 Bishop Terrace,

Kinnesswood,

Kinross.

AS someone who worked for the NHS for many years, and whose beloved partner died aged 58 after five years of misdiagnosis of his bowel cancer, I feel reasonably qualified to comment on Colette Douglas Home's latest column ("Salmond's NHS pledge is not enough to make me vote Yes, The Herald, August 19).

The NHS failed us very badly when it came to managing my partner's cancer, but rather than dwell on the dry statistics of which area is "beating" the other in the early death stakes, I think more about what would have happened to both of us if the NHS had been privatised. Having suffered a stroke in the same week as his cancer was finally diagnosed, I don't doubt we could not have paid for the healthcare we both urgently needed.

My decision to vote Yes arises instead from the story my father used to tell. His mother died when he was two, in 1930, and he was raised by grandparents who had no state pension, and no help to feed him and his baby brother. When he was five, he fell from a tree and was knocked unconscious. At that time, it cost a shilling to consult a doctor; a shilling they could not hope to find. And so he lay unconscious, untreated, for two days. Clearly he survived, but as a parent and grandparent myself, that image haunts me.

My fears for the continuance of the NHS began with Margaret Thatcher's denial of the existence of society and any shared responsibility for the misfortunes of our fellow man. I have watched for almost 40 years as she and her successors - sadly not all Tories - have gone on dismantling and destroying industries and public services (including the NHS) which provided care and support for workers, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable.

So, I am not frightened by the inevitable uncertainties that face any newly independent nation. But I am terrified by the belief that if we continue as we are it will be my grandson, or his children, who will face life - and death - without the NHS.

Alice Timmons,

110 Ledard Road,

Langside,

Glasgow.

I CAN fully understand why NHS employees and their unions would worry about the outsourcing of services provided by the NHS, but surely taxpayers and patients have quite different concerns. Of paramount importance to taxpayers will be value for money and for patients it will be quality of care. Provided the latter continues to be available free at point of delivery, then the status of the provider is irrelevant.

In England, as in Scotland, the NHS is politically a very hot potato and no party with the ambition to govern would have the temerity to diminish, let alone demolish, it. As your columnist Colette Douglas Home so clearly showed, the NHS in England is in many areas outperforming NHS Scotland. Is this because of, or in spite of, outsourcing, or as the SNP would prefer to have it, privatisation?

If the SNP fear that Scotland's contribution from the Barnet formula will be diminished owing to greater efficiencies achieved by the NHS in England, then what precisely are they saying? That we should be subsidised for our relative inefficiency? It is an argument, but not one a proud country aspiring to independence should be making.

Jim Meikle,

41 Lampson Road,

Killearn.