Thank God – or rather Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan and the Labour government of 1945 – for the NHS. Just imagine what it was like before health care, paid through taxation, became free at the point of delivery? It’s unthinkable, isn’t it, unless you think about it, in which case it isn’t. I bow to no one for the love and admiration I feel for the NHS and those who work for it, I’m just not sure it’s what it is cracked up to be.
We know what the NHS is. It’s the greatest emergency health service in the world. If your life is threatened by a medical condition, the NHS leaps into action. If you are in agony, paramedics are with you in what feels like the blink of an eye to relieve your immediate pain and arrange to put you back together again. What it isn’t is perfect. Far from it.
Suffer from a condition, mental or physical, that is not obviously life-threatening and you get in line, often a very long line. In some areas of the NHS, you are put ‘on hold’ before you can even get on a waiting list. That is a lived experience and one I know that several friends and acquaintances understand only too well. It didn’t used to be like this, but this thing called politics came along.
In the 2000s when I was going through my usual mental health meltdowns, it was far easier to actually see a doctor, moreover a doctor of your choice. And waiting lists for most forms of treatment were virtually non existent. This was because the previous government, a Labour government, had invested in the NHS like none other. It wasn’t just the shiny new hospitals that Labour built: they presided over the recruitment of huge numbers of extra doctors and nurses. Rarely did people suffer physical or mental pain for any longer than they had to. This is not the case today.
I live with someone who suffers unbearable physical pain on a daily basis. In the absence of speedy NHS treatment, she ‘enjoys’ a diet of powerful painkillers and works around the agony. Medical intervention we hope, will come along eventually, but we know not when. Mere pain is not an emergency. And neither is mental health unless you are at the level where the Samaritans are a useful option. I’ve been ‘offered’ six sessions of therapy by an NHS ‘provider’ but if I need anymore, I’ll have to pay for it. Let’s hope Matt Hancock doesn’t extend this scheme to cancer treatment. “Okay. You get your first six sessions of chemo for nothing but if you don’t want to die, there is the option of selling your house and living in a tent because chemo doesn’t come cheap. That’s called ‘choice’ in the treatment you receive.”
If I fall under a bus today – I couldn’t afford to fall under a taxi – and by some miracle I survive, I’ll be grateful at the top notch patch-up I’ll probably get. But increasingly the NHS is becoming an emergency only service with a few token add-ons. It’s still a great health system, and an even greater principle, but I do hope at some point in the future we stop voting for political parties – well, the Conservative Party – which don’t believe in the principle of universal care, free at the point of delivery, funded by all of us. Older people, who use the NHS more than most and still vote for a political party that opposes it in principle and so deliberately underfunds it, please take note.
