Katrina Cummins is right in her claim (LETTER: Hospital ward closure is waste of taxpayers' money and part of plan to privatise the NHS) that a ward closure is a waste of cash but quite wrong to suggest the NHS is short of funds.

The problem overall is one of waste, primarily on the number of so-called managers and their assistants and ancillary staff who appear incapable of managing anything.

In addition to their princely salaries and benefits, they waste money on medicines, Elastoplast, rubber gloves, crutches and walking sticks (all single-use for inexplicable reasons) to mention but a few.

The employment of agency staff too is a financial drain. It would be interesting to hear how many of the managers ever disappear in the interest of money-saving. Few, I suspect, and those who do, reappear as the private suppliers of the agency staff who cost so much more, but earn little more, than permanent staff.

It seems to me pointless too to attribute any problems to an imagined Government plan to privatise the service. Personally, it seems to me irrelevant by whom the service is provided as long as the care of the sick is adequate, which it is far from being under the present management arrangements.

EJ Malone, Bromley