NOW that the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has admitted taking his kids to A&E because he couldn’t wait for a GP appointment can we stop bashing everyone who does that and address the real problem here?

If the public – including many of the incomers who now live in this country – feel they can best access care at their local hospital then we should acknowledge that and divert the money we have used to line GPs’ very deep pockets into installing them at A&E.

That way they can weed out the simple cases and leave the big ones for the emergency room.

For years after the Labour government paid doctors more money and allowed them not to work evenings and weekends I had to drive my stricken ones to our local A&E – simply because the ‘out-of-hours GP service’ was on the same route only further away and in a scary, run-down part of town with no nearby parking and bored, disinterested staff manning the place.

On the one occasion I did call the out-of-hours service we received no reply back and as I know that asthma can kill, decided a dead child wasn’t worth doing the ‘right thing’ for and made the hospital dash.

So I’m sick of A&E and GPs telling the people who pay their wages not to visit them but stay at home and only call if really necessary. How are we supposed to know?

It’s THEIR job to decide if we’re suffering indigestion instead of a heart attack and if people are in such pain or discomfort they feel they’d like to see a doctor they should be fully entitled.

That’s what we pay them for.

The fact that many hospitals are now overrun is not the fault of patients, it’s the fault of people like Jeremy Hunt – politicians – who were happy to allow untrammelled immigration without providing the resources to cope with it, and by their constant ‘reorganising’ and cost-cutting of the services we do have.

Mr Hunt reckons: “We have to recognise that society is changing and people don’t always know whether the care that they need is urgent or whether it is an emergency, and making GPs available at weekends will relieve a lot of pressure on A&E departments.”

It’s the most sensible thing he’s said for a long time, maybe the most sensible thing he’s ever said.

But until we see concrete action backed up by a major public information campaign we are going to see A&E clogged with people who don’t need to be there and those who do, sitting at home, too scared to bother the doctor.

She’s spicy Currie

AN AWFUL lot of men fancy Edwina Currie – currently in I’m A Celebrity – claims her husband, John Jones. “She’s a bit of a sex goddess to some people.”

That may come as a surprise to some but not me.

In my former incarnation as a court reporter I’ve witnessed men fessing up to fancying everything from fish to farm animals for pity’s sake. There have always been men who fancy birds like Edwina. She’s feisty, bossy, and possibly – given the evidence of her affair with John Major – a bit of a goer.

I don’t know what her old man is like but she’s always struck me as the ideal mate for the sort of chap for whom the highlight of their day is a Werther’s Original.

Apologise... and resign

SO, Andrew Mitchell DID use the word pleb, when addressing a police officer in Downing Street. That’s what Mr Justice Mitting says, concluding the former Chief Whip’s libel case against the copper who Mitchell claimed had lied.

I never had any doubt he did say pleb because it sounds exactly like the sort of thing he would say.

Instead of appealing or whingeing, Andrew Mitchell should ask himself just what he has said and done in his time that made so many people find it so easy to believe he had reacted in this vile, snobbish, inconsiderate way to someone, I am guessing, he thought wouldn’t fight back.

And then he should apologise and resign his seat.

How much actual money?

LILY Allen says the reason she snubbed the chance to appear on Band Aid 30 was because she thought the project ‘smug’ and ‘self-serving’.

Instead, she says, she prefers to donate ‘actual money’.

Of course she does!

How much?

She doesn’t say. But they never do, do they?

Lewis drives me round the bend

THAT Lewis Hamilton Formula 1 World Championship triumph in full: man drives car faster round some bends than other blokes managed to.

Using war to sell groceries

SORRY, but I am NOT moved by the Sainsbury’s Christmas ad featuring the legendary football match in No Man’s Land that took place in the First World War.

That match encapsulated the utter, pointless, pitiable misery of a war 100 years ago.

And they are using it to try and shift more groceries.