The current news about our health service will come as no surprise to the majority of staff working in the NHS.

The crisis in A & E services is just the very public face of a funding shortfall that has been ongoing since the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition came to power.

For the last four years NHS trusts in England have been forced to cut almost 6% from their budgets year on year.

The NHS is not being ‘protected’ or ‘ring fenced’ as David Cameron would have us believe and the scale of these savings is now being felt right across our NHS.

Put that together with the huge cuts to local government funding which make it difficult, if not impossible at times, to place elderly people who are in a hospital bed into residential care and you have a ‘perfect storm’ for our health services.

When you then consider the totally unnecessary and costly reorganisation of NHS commissioning services (primary care trusts becoming clinical commissioning groups) imposed by the government together with the reckless scrapping of NHS Direct, it makes your blood boil.

It is to the eternal credit of committed and loyal NHS staff that they keep services going in a professional and effective manner wherever possible.

Many are at breaking point, however, and the government’s miserly withholding of a 1% pay rise two years running will only add to their sense of betrayal.

Peter Atkinson, Wolseley Road, Portslade Labour candidate, Portslade North