TURN up at Brighton's main hospital with an emergency and the chances are that you will be kept waiting for several hours even if you are in pain and discomfort. It's happened to me and to many friends and relations over the years.

You'll be dealt with promptly all right if it's a matter of life and death. But if your problem is a broken arm or a gashed leg, that's usually different, even though you're in what is called the accident and emergency department.

Part of the problem is caused by people going there for trivialities which could be dealt with by GPs. But the long waits, sometimes on hospital trollies, are symptomatic of what's wrong with the National Health Service.

They are not the fault of the consultant in charge and his dedicated team who are only too aware of what is happening and things may be a bit better when the new extension to the hospital is finally ready.

But we have unreasonable expectations of the NHS these days and it is not able to cope fully unless there are changes which are going to be hard to put over politically.

When Nye Bevan started the NHS after the last war, the idea was to have as much treatment as possible free. But only a few years later, Labour frontbenchers were resigning because of the introduction of prescription charges.

Anyone who visits the dentist regularly will know that treatment costs a fair bit even on the NHS and that it's increasingly difficult to find practices which are other than private.

The NHS will probably have to adopt the same tactics if it is to survive and provide top-class, all-round services.

No one wants to abandon the basic principle of offering free treatment to people who have had heart attacks or who have been involved in serious accidents.

But the NHS needs to have a serious look at its priorities beyond that. It might be worth persuading people who need their hernias repaired or varicose veins removed that if possible they have these routine ops done under private insurance schemes.

Successive governments, Tory and Labour, have put extra money into the NHS and it still has problems in coping with emergencies, not just in Brighton but in practically every town in Britain. Ask the local health trusts.

Before the Blair Government took office, I warned that its biggest difficulty would arise with the NHS and it seems that this is coming true.

Despite the enormous extra investment, the service creaks and groans. There is often an alarming shortage both of beds and of staff.

I'd like to see politicians or health bosses say that they'll tackle emergencies first and let people with persistent but minor complaints take more of a back seat.

But I'm not sure if anyone's got the bottle to do it right now.

DAN, the Department of Appropriate Names, was pleased to see that information from the Meat and Livestock Commission came to us through a Mr Bullock.

PROMINENT on the cover of this year's Brighton Festival brochure is the Dome with a large tree in the foreground. I wonder if this is supposed to symbolise the controversial elm, which it will cost at least £130,000 to save, standing in the way of building renovation.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.