Letters to the Editor - Saturday, October 29

Letters to the Editor, Saturday, October 29.

GrinBin. Picture: Mark Lynch

The state of practice in our hospitals

I AM afraid the health system in Australia is failing patients.

You generally go into hospital with a genuine health issue to be resolved, which leads me to another medical mistake.

I have recently heard of an elderly man in his 90s who was admitted to a hospital in Australia and his urinary catheter was connected to an oxygen outlet. 　

Ten medical staff were involved with his care over several days.

Can you just imagine the extreme pain he was in and he complained several times before passing away.　

I am so devastated that this happened, for God's sake.　

Fix the system and it is so obvious medical staff need urgent help and more training ASAP.

Leigh Harvey, retired aged care nurse.

Coffs Harbour

Gun control at home and yet wars abroad

JOHN Howard is a hypocrite calling for tougher gun laws.

He supported the criminal invasion of Iraq, which overthrew the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, under which all religious factions lived in relative harmony, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives and eventually spawned ISIS. And he says he wants to save lives?

Bob Vinnicombe

Phone towers present risks to residents

TO ALL concerned in Coffs and the surrounding district, recently a potentially harmful tower so-called project has come to my attention.

Now, do we absolutely know if these will not harm us, we should think about this very carefully, because it's all in the name of instant gratification and could potentially be harmful to our children's brains.

Let us not risk being a statistic and put a hold on this project.

Yes we think of these things and yes we speak among ourselves, family etc.

Things are getting away from us.

Maybe we should exercise some commonsense, which unfortunately isn't that common these days. Thank you.

Julian Ormesher

Do you believe your star signs?

LET me ask your readers some questions. Do you read your star signs? If you do, do you believe them? If so, what is the reason you believe them? Why do you trust them?

In different countries with all their thousands of newspapers and magazines the star signs would be written by thousands of different writers - they would all have all their thousands of different star sign stories. So how could you believe any of them?

Now I am side-tracking a bit. Scoop up a handful of fine dune sand. Spread this sand on a sheet of glass and try to count the grains of sand - impossible, there are thousands upon thousands.

Now imagine you take all the sand of a 1km stretch of beach - this would be thousands of tons of sand, more than trillions of trillions of sand.

Now imagine you take all the sand of the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of beaches around the world - an unimaginable quantity of grains of sand.

And yet scientists say there are more stars in the universe than there is are grains of sand in the world.

So how could we even begin to imagine how stars could have an influence on people on a tiny speck, the Earth, in the endless universe?

Paul Bosman