Proposal to save hospital

mAY we make the, perhaps revolutionary, suggestion that St. Teresa's Catholic Maternity Hospital at Wimbledon should revert to the status of a voluntary hospital now that the National Health Service there has been withdrawn?
In the first place, St. Teresa's would then be free of direction in its medical and administrative practice. In the second place, the Catholic laity could take out private medical insurances to cover the cost of possible maternity treatment (as was done in voluntary hospitals in the days before the N.H.S.).
In the third place, gifts and bequests might be forthcoming to aid a hospital devoted to such a good cause. I am sure St. Teresa's could survive with the backing of the Catholic laity.
No doubt Catholic mothers are well treated in purely State hospitals, the maternity wards of some of which have very devoted sisters and nurses in charge of mothers-to-be and new mothers. But a specifically religious foundation, one supposes, must find its own funds. This seems, however, a little hard in view of the fact that the hospital is providing maternity care within the N.H.S. framework, and Church and State should surely work together.
Gwendoline Willis (Miss) London, S.W.3.