Alexandra McTeare’s account of her wait for knee surgery and all the problems that come with it (Letters, March 5) resonates with my own experience. Here in Brighton, however, the wait for knee surgery is further complicated by the added hurdle of actually reaching the waiting list.
I visited my GP over a year ago with arthritic pain in my knee, but was told he could not refer me directly to a surgeon as this was only possible through a certain group of physiotherapists. I visited a number of physiotherapists for over nine months, but was not referred to a surgeon. It appears that the non-physician members of this group of physiotherapists are employing some form of opaque rationing of access to orthopedic surgeons (possibly based on my age of 76) to limit the number of patients on the waiting list.
A cynic might suggest that this is government policy to massage the waiting list statistics. After ten months, out of a mixture of pain and desperation, and a sense of my own dwindling years, I was forced to reluctantly take out a loan to see an orthopedic surgeon privately (in the same hospital and with the same surgeons as NHS patients). I just hope it will be worth the cost and that I will live long enough to pay off the loan and not leave it as an inheritance for my son.
Erik Tyrer
Brighton, East Sussex