RECENT events in my own life have resulted in my getting rather more close and personal than I would have wanted with the NHS.

There is nothing like personal experience to get a better understanding of the issues.

While these thoughts are based on personal experience and do not relate to the NHS in Ludlow and south Shropshire or Tenbury and West Worcestershire they do reflect what people in this part the world say to me.

The NHS is a huge organisation and, as in any walk of life, some people are better at their jobs than others but overall the people who work in the NHS are dedicated, hard-working and highly professional. Mistakes happen but this will be the case in every business and organisation and we hear too much about what goes wrong and not enough about the many success stories.

Warts and all, the NHS is wonderful and one of the few things, perhaps the only thing in which this once great country can be truly proud.

At the core is Primary Care and, while most GPs are dedicated and hard working, the joke about the first prize in a major lottery prize draw being an GP appointment within a week is too close to the truth to be funny.

People who do not consider themselves to be old remember a time when they went to the doctors and queued, even if they had to wait several hours. This should be partially restored with one doctor in each practice taking on this role. People who are really ill will wait and the others can make an appointment.

With too many GPs the alternative to a face-to-face appointment many days ahead is usually a telephone conversation.

For people with relatively minor conditions this may do but it is not adequate for people with more serious conditions because any good clinician will tell that nothing beats a face-to-face consultation.

The consequence of this is that conditions that could be dealt with through early intervention can fail to get the treatment that is needed and end up as an emergency and a trip to Accident and Emergency.

Most people would also like to see a return to the past with the GP practice being responsible for out-of-hours cover.

In the experience of many people the worst part of the NHS is the hideous 111 service. The people that take the calls are generally nice enough but it would surely be better to consult the entrails of a goat.

People who are worried or frightened or ringing on behalf of people who are ill end up having to play 20 questions with someone who has no medical experience.

Having had experience of NHS 111 I would never use it again and many people tell me the same so what happens is that a problem gets escalated to a 999 call or visit to Accident and Emergency. There is nowhere else to go.

So what happens is that the inability to get proper and prompt GP care results in problems that might have been dealt with at an early stage escalating upwards.

Perhaps the NHS is best at dealing with very serious or crisis-type situations but the problem is that the failure to have proper and accessible primary care, including out-of-hours, earlier on can bring about a crisis or emergency that in some cases need not have happened.