The case of Rachel King, a road accident victim who was told by King’s College Hospital that she would have to wait up to 80 weeks for an NHS brain scan, illustrates the management problems that still dog the health service. As revealed by The Times, Ms King was upset not only by the inordinately long timeframe to discover what is causing her dizzy spells and reduced vision, but also by the handwritten scribble on the hospital’s letter that gave the telephone number of its private clinic where she could have the procedure carried out in two weeks.

Waiting lists have long been a curse of the NHS despite repeated initiatives to solve the problem, as has MRSA. Today’s news about spot checks for MRSA looks like a repeat of good intentions that have so far produced little. The superbug is a horrifying problem that needs to be properly managed, not packaged and re-packaged.

On waiting lists, the Government has had much more success. But it remains acutely sensitive to what the Liberal Democrats have dubbed “hidden waits”: delays in getting a diagnosis. There is no doubt that maximum waiting times have fallen dramatically in the health service. But those figures do not reflect the tedium of awaiting a scan.

A year ago, the Health Secretary set a new waiting time of three months from GP referral to hospital treatment by 2008, to include diagnostic waits. Could this prove a hostage to fortune? The Liberal Democrats last December found that one in five trusts had waiting times of more than a year for MRI scans, and two in five had waits of more than six months. One in ten trusts reported waits of more than six months for CT scans used to diagnose cancer. England, despite improvements, still lags behind most of Western Europe in cancer survival.

Rachel King’s experience does not, as some would have it, show that private health care is a bad thing. Private insurance will play a crucial role as individuals choose to invest in the improvement of the health system. Nevertheless it would be quite wrong for a hospital to deliberately ration public care to boost its private profits. The false impression that this has is fuelling a popular conspiracy.

If there is any conspiracy at all, it seems to be the lack of flexibility within the NHS. Some of the substantial investment in equipment is not yet paying off because of rigidities in the system. Many hospitals, for example, say that they have spare MRI capacity but not the resources to man the scanners within their current budgets. This is of little comfort to patients who have seen so much money spent.

Where Rachel King is concerned, King's College Hospital has acknowledged that it is not “best practice to have handwritten additions to letters”. That is welcome. It also promises that Ms King will be seen in September, and says that it has recently received extra funds to reduce waiting times for all MRI scans to 26 weeks by next March. Hopefully, the waiting wll soon be over.

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