Mea Culpa: health service in a grammatical crisis

Questions of style and language in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

No mere experts, these are top doctors... (PA)

We were caught out by short headlines a couple of times in recent days, both of them on news stories about the problems of the health service. One headline said: “A&E delays killing up to 500 people a week, top expert warns.” Most readers will have taken the intended meaning from that, I am sure, but others will have stumbled over it, trying to work out why accident and emergency departments would kill people, let alone why they should postpone these dreadful murders. We inserted “are” after “delays”.

Incidentally, we should also be wary of the word “expert”, and try to be more specific. In this case, the warning came from Dr Adrian Boyle, the president of Royal College of Emergency Medicine, so his warning was certainly to be taken seriously, and “top doctor” would have been better.

The other headline was: “Health chiefs warn NHS to remain in crisis until Easter.” Again, the ambiguity may have passed many readers by, but John Harrison wrote to say that this sounded like an order: that health chiefs were instructing the NHS to remain in crisis. A “will” instead of “to” would have fixed it.