JANE Lax (“SNP has taken its eye off the ball”, October 15) wrote an interesting and concise letter, catching my eye with a wonderfully scary statistic, a nice swipe at doctors – in particular GPs, but not missing those in secondary care – and finally sticking it to the SNP.

To be accurate, the figure she quoted derives from a single week of excess deaths ending the week of October 10 and includes Covid deaths, chronic progressive conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and respiratory conditions, which makes up more than half of the 30 per cent quoted.

That is not to deny either problems in the NHS or the simple fact that Covid will cause an increase in deaths indirectly, however disingenuous the figure quoted. The problem, though, lies with lack of resource, not recalcitrant staff practices, and I refer to lack of workforce, not wages.

The most up-to-date source of comparison by country I could find was published by the OECD.

The figures are for the UK as a whole, and we are the 14th worst of 37 countries for proportion of doctors to patients; that may be expressed awkwardly but when I also point out we are the 15th highest of 38 countries for premature death (these are 2019 figures, avoiding Covid as an issue) the correlation becomes more understandable.

I, of course, accept that correlation doesn’t prove causation, but it does pose a question. The problem of understaffing the NHS spans years and implicates all political parties.

Certainly it makes sense to blame NHS failings on doctors, the human shield for politicians of all stripes. It would be tangential and too time-consuming to confront long-held and cherished misconceptions – but the NHS did not shut down, GPs did continue from the very start of the pandemic to see patients in person, and hospitals tried to continue non-Covid but urgent medical care.

The myth of “closed doors” is egregious except in the sense of preventing poor souls wandering the corridors in the interest of infection control.

The proportion of in-person contact had to be adjusted to allow greater numbers to be assessed and for fellow professionals to staff Covid Assessment Centres and then direct care to those most in need during a crisis, one which is ongoing.

Still, things could be worse. There are only seven countries of 42 with fewer hospital beds per head of population than the UK, according to the OECD.

Primary care would seem to be punching above its weight if anyone could believe the suggestion that a deficiency of doctors and hospital beds could impact health outcomes.

Denis Clifford, Kilsyth.

WHEN LOCAL ISN’T QUITE LOCAL

MY husband has just received his appointment for a Covid and flu vaccination.

The centre he has to visit is 21 miles away, in Johnstone. Given that there is a centre one mile from us I don’t understand the logistics, as surely a computer programme would match post-codes to localities of centres.

I phoned the helpline and after going through various processes I got to speak to an adviser who didn’t seem to have a grasp of the geography of Glasgow and surrounding areas, as I was offered appointments in Bearsden (15 miles away) or Giffnock (10 miles away).

Eventually she arranged an appointment at our local centre.

This process must be causing problems for many people who perhaps don’t understand that they can rearrange the appointment and worry about getting to the centre.

It is also costing the NHS money to staff the helpline, which would not be needed If the process was expedited correctly in the first place

Christine Cameron, Garrowhill, Glasgow.

A BEDSIDE MANNER THAT I CAME TO DREAD

READING about the demand for a return to face-to-face consultations with GP’s, my thoughts go back to the 1950s when I, as a small child, had to suffer the attentions of a large and heavy GP who always came bouncing into our home and descended onto my bed, invariably squashing my feet.

I appear to have suffered from most of the childhood ailments circulating at the time but, to me, the greatest suffering of all came from home visits by my GP.

He may have been a great clinician, because I am still around to tell the tale, but he had an appalling bedside manner.

I would have welcomed remote consultations with open arms – our recent two-metre social distancing for a start, would have protected my feet – but of course the current technology wasn’t available, or even conceived of.

David L. Smith, Newton Mearns.

A TOTALITARIAN COVID VACCINE POLICY

THERE is nothing more certain than that the next gigantic U-turn in a very, very long series of U-turns by the SNP is the Covid vaccine policy.

It will bite the dust with all the others primarily because it will certainly cost them votes, and they need these votes eventually to implement the only policy that really concerns them.

In the meantime we have to go through this “papers, please’’ totalitarian rigmarole because of the arrogance of the SNP and the insistence that they are right and everyone else wrong and the empress is indeed wearing clothes.

This effort could have been much better employed trying to persuade those still reluctant to vaccinate – even if that meant – as Jackie Baillie suggests - door-to-door campaigns.

It is no comfort to know that this policy will fall like so many others and the Special Adviser Army will be employed trying to spin that that is what they intended all along.

Alexander McKay, Edinburgh.

THIS BBC REPORT JUST WASN’T CRICKET

IT’S astonishing that Mark Smith hasn’t noticed the anti-SNP and anti-Scotland bias of the BBC (“Dear Mr Russell, you’ve got it wrong about bias at the BBC”, October 18).

He makes a fair point about the difference between opinion and news pieces in the press. Opinion pieces are biased because they are meant to be, readers understand that, and papers like The Herald contain thoughtful, often provocative opinion pieces which both support and attack Scottish independence and the SNP.

But the reporting on BBC news by broadcast journalists such as Sarah Smith or Laura Kuenssberg is highly partisan and will always put a negative spin on Scotland, the Scottish Government and the SNP, whilst Kuenssberg herself is little more than the Tory party mouthpiece.

Even innocuous and non-political news is biased in the BBC. Only the other night I watched Clive Myrie announce in astonished tones that Scotland (shock! horror!) had beaten Bangladesh at a cricket match.

His reaction indicated an unconscious bias of belittling Scotland as the standard default position. Why could Mr Myrie not just report this as a fact? If it is an unusual occurrence, why could he not have provided some facts to support how unusual (i.e., significant) this was? Why didn’t he mention the delight of Scottish cricket fans?

The BBC is supposedly the standard-bearer of Britishness, so why could he not have made more of the fact that this was news which all Britons should celebrate? But the effect of his querulous tone was to isolate and put down Scotland. The news item was then promptly dismissed without further coverage.

Mairianna Clyde, Edinburgh.

MARK Smith is right when he points out that opinion should not be confused with news, and asks for “programmes, dates, times” as evidence that programmes from Scotland are heavily weighted against nationalism”.

May I suggest, for starters, Question Time and Newsnight; and as for dates and times, almost every time they are on air.

Despite the SNP being the third largest party in the House of Commons, they seldom appear on these programmes – unlike in olden times, when the Liberal Democrats popped up regularly when they were the third largest party at Westminster.

On September 16, 2014, a couple of days before the independence referendum, this newspaper’s view was that “The Herald backs Scotland staying within the UK at this stage. But fudge this process, stitch it up and fail to deliver far-reaching further devolution, and make no mistake: you will be guaranteeing another referendum – one that you will lose, and deserve to lose”.

My question to The Herald is: do you believe that far-reaching further devolution has been delivered, and if you don’t, will you call for another referendum on Scotland’s constitutional future? That would be your opinion, but it would also be news.

Ruth Marr, Stirling.

MARK Smith is not a columnist with whom I often agree, but he got it right with his remarks about alleged BBC ‘bias’.

Governments of every description in this country have feuded with the Corporation over what they view as its bias. The Tories have made all sorts of unpleasant noises about cutting the BBC down to size, partly because they suspect what they see as its liberal tendencies. BBC news correspondents do a much more efficient job of reporting the failings at Holyrood and Westminster than do those newspapers that proudly display their own, inflated political bias.

M. Hunter, Glasgow.