SIR - This letter is based on Government statistics and statements made by Messrs Barlow, Burnham and Rostill during the recent BBC debate. An NHS deficit of £512m is to be offset by 12,000 redundancies in the 188 trusts that are overspent.

Therefore, the average repayment and jobs lost per trust are £2.7m and 64 respectively.

Before the debate, Mr Barlow had said the combined deficit of our trusts was £330m and, to his credit, expressed great concern for the 720 redundancies required to repay this debt, of which £13m is due to Government underfunding.

The net deficit in our acute hospital trust is therefore, £17m which

has to be offset by 408 redundancies. Why are both these figures more than six times greater than the averages for all overspent trusts? Mr Burnham's statement does him no credit. He was at pains to stress how small the total NHS debt is, compared with the total NHS budget. Yet he made no mention of, or concern for, the 12,000 people to be made redundant. This was deplorable. Mr Rostill was keen to say that his £5m overspend on a £250m turnover was equal to having a £20k salary and an overdraft of £400.

But he made no mention of, nor expressed concern for, the 120 job losses required to repay his £5m debt. This was cavalier and inappropriate to his position in the NHS.

I M JARVIS,

Worcester.