IT is now 10 years since the Bengoa Report claimed to have solved the crisis in our health service.

All Stormont’s main political parties supported its proposals, but in the meantime the Assembly has collapsed twice and the crumbling NHS is in a worse state now than then.

In the intervening years we have had five different ministers of health and an endless transfusion of strategies and reports.

The obvious scientific conclusion is that the number of reports is directly proportionate to the increasing numbers on hospital waiting lists – the more reports, the longer the lists.

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The conventional wisdom emerging from this organised inertia is that the NHS faces two main problems.

The first is that we have too many hospitals providing too many services.

The second is that health trusts cannot find enough specialist physicians to work in apparently remote outposts like Newry and Enniskillen.

The first reflects the flawed nature of the remnants of Bengoa. If some medical services are to be removed from regional hospitals, people living in their catchment........

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