Sir – When will the Government and NHS managers realise that their policy of closing geriatric hospitals, thus forcing patients to be nursed at home or placed in expensive private nursing homes, is proving to be a disastrous policy that is speeding the demise of the NHS?

Nursing patients in their own homes is proving difficult to staff and expensive, often resulting in absolute misery both for the patients and their relatives.

Nursing homes’ fees of some £700 a week for those of modest means are only affordable for a short time, for when their savings are used up the patient’s home is expected to be sold to pay the fees.

When all the cash from the sale of the house is used up, then the relatives will be expected to make a contribution towards the fees. Cash wasted by badly-run nursing homes could be better used by the NHS and also prevent the blocking of beds by the elderly transferred from homes into NHS general hospitals.

Surely the answer is to build once more the geriatric hospitals once run so effectively by the NHS and charge moderate fees to all but the poorest? Thus at least the elderly sick would once more get adequate care and the NHS would also benefit from an infusion of cash, which would otherwise be wasted on the third-rate care given in so many nursing homes. The fees charged by the homes for the elderly are extortionate, but it is the poor care given to the residents in some homes that rings shame to all involved in supervision of such establishments.

The punitive way the elderly sick are now often treated is a national disgrace.

Growing old is not a crime, it happens to all of us, serious illness in old age is a problem that any decent society should be able to take in its stride with compassion and competence.

A. Thorning SRN (Mrs), Oxford