London.—At the end of my last letter I said that the National Health Service (NHS) had been reorganized, and six months later that still seems to be the right word. The patients and the doctors are much the same, but the organization of hospital committees, area health boards, and so on is different, for better or for worse.
Politicians and newspapers assured us for years that we had a health service that was the envy of the world, but they said it so often that it lost its impact. Quite recently, it has become respectable to declare that, au contraire, the service is running down, grinding to a halt. This also did not bring instant conviction, for the changes are slow like the shrinking of a glacier. But if one thinks about it... well, we used not to have to close wards because of shortage of nurses, now it's