‘Luckily for patients we still have such dedicated doctors to stand up for us’

• WHAT on Earth are “junior” doctors doing going on strike, those highly-trained people working exceptionally long hours in a job caring for patients?

Luckily for patients we still have such dedicated doctors to stand up for us. Without them, their nursing and ambulance colleagues and other staff, nothing remains of the NHS.

They are our last hope for decent standards of care. If we don’t know that, we are indeed the fools the government desperately hopes we are.

What has become of Britain that we are so far down the road of abandoning the NHS? Yes everyone, from the prime minister and health secretary to the person in the street, “loves” the NHS. But not much.

Why is it so hard for this country to understand that we are the people who can make the difference, no one else?

The stage was already set by Jeremy Hunt’s ruthless suppression of an unprecedented “junior” doctors strike in 2015 when he was health secretary. Nothing has changed in this approach.

But the collapse of the NHS is imminent and we will have nowhere to go for proper care free at the point of delivery.

Our country’s striking junior doctors stand between us and that fate. They are the people we can rely on for our future wellbeing – if the country stands up for them now.

SHARON LYTTON, N6