There is clearly something wrong with the system if a case like that of 84-year-old Joseph Taylor is deemed to be of such low priority that he has to wait six months before it can even be assessed. Mr Taylor has recently had a leg amputated and now needs to have his bathroom adapted to enable him to have a bath.

He is fiercely independent. Despite being only partially sighted and suffering from angina, he is determined to manage on his own. That is the sort of attitude which is being encouraged in older people. However, continuing independence often relies on community care which is not always readily available, as Mr Taylor has discovered.

His problem is that he cannot get in and out of the bath. However, when he asked for the equipment to enable him to do so, he was told that he must wait six months to see an occupational therapist to be "fully assessed".

Surely it does not take specialist skills to see that here is an elderly man who has difficult manoeuvring because he has a leg missing? There should be some sort of fast-track system to assess people who undergo such life-changing surgery.

Anyone with common sense should be able to see that someone in Mr Taylor's position needs a hoist - a piece of equipment commonly available to the elderly and disabled - to make his life easier and enable his independence to continue.

This is yet another classic example of a case in which wodges of red tape have blocked the path to a speedy and sensible solution of what should be a very straight-forward problem.

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