Talks are being held between the Scottish Executive and a Polish medical company which is offering up to 1,000 operations a year at a new hospital in the south west of the country.

Patients would be there for two weeks with the total cost, including flights, possibly being about half that in Scotland.

Are you waiting for such an operation? Would you go abroad to reduce your waiting time? Do you think the NHS should be looking at such initiatives?

The public must make a choice when it comes to NHS services. If we want instant treatments for non-life threatening illnesses then we must be prepared to pay the premiums involved in financing theses services.

As it is the NHS has a pretty good track record of treatment for acute patients. However over the last two decades with longer life expectancies and the exponential development of more complex treatments and costly drugs the funding being put into the service has been relatively static in real terms.

If in the short term if we can out-source some of the treatments in order to bring waiting lists down to more acceptable levels for our existing infrastructure to maintain then I can see nothing fundamentally wrong with the approach. If this is to be a long-term policy we either have to accept it or be prepared to be taxed further to finance to bring these services back into the NHS.
Douglas Bell, UK

Having watched my mother suffer in pain for several months while waiting for an operation for her hip replacement I would welcome any initiative that sped up the process. She refused point blank to allow any of us to pay for her treatment privately - we have all been lifelong supporters of the NHS and she felt really strongly that having paid all her working life into the system that it should be there for her when she needed it.

Sadly this meant that her retirement was spoiled by the endless wait to be considered bad enough just to get on the waiting list and then months and months of pain and discomfort that severely limited the quality of her life. An ordinary working woman, she had little call on the NHS during her life and was dismayed at the delay when she had finaly retired and could not enjoy her time off.

Her operation finally took place about nine months ago and while the recovery period is lengthy, the worst fact is that she always knew she would need two hips done! The second one is a problem but she feels utterly despondant that the wait to have this done will mean many more months of pain and limitations on her life.

If she felt confident of the quality of medical care being equivalent to the UK I am sure she would consider the Polish option. The only factor would be the support services for family members as despite being a strong character she did benefit from the post-operative support of family visiting her for the week she was in hospital afterwards.

I think that options for her husband or another carer should be considered as part of the package (elderly people in particular would want the support of a loved one) and there may be a need to reassure her that there would be no language barriers.

Carolyn Stenhose, Scotland