Thank you NHS

by catherinerogan

When Prince George was born I was pretty grumpy. I’m a republican at the best of times and the (soon to be repeated) wall-to-wall contraction-by-contraction coverage really annoyed me. I went online to a feminist knitting forum I frequent to complain that the birth had been at the la-di-da £5,000 a night Saint Mary’s Hospital. The forum (mostly US women) replied “Wow, that’s so cheap.” And they’re not kidding.

I have taken the NHS for granted. It’s just always been there for me. It cut me out of my mother’s abdomen when I was the wrong way up. It straightened out my sister’s spine. It put me on the pill. It safely (for me and for him) delivered my son. It has inserted (to date) three IUDs into my womb and (most recently) it picked up the pieces when I, showing off in front of my son, fell off a bouldering wall and managed to smash up my ankle really quite thoroughly. Never mind all the vaccinations,  scans, smear tests, check-ups and doctor’s appointments.

It did all these things regardless of my employment status, or my ability to pay. While there were ways in which I could have felt better supported in the first hours, days and months of my child’s life at no point did I think “this whole experience would have been better if it had cost the same as a large, brand new family car”.

There’s a tendency to imagine that the harried nature of A+E, the overworked nurses, the cancelled appointments are somehow the fault of the public sector. It’s a slow retreat from socialised medicine – “maybe if we had internal markets, maybe if there was competition”, “people can pay for the dentist, people can pay for glasses”. We can and should expect better from our NHS – with funding. My time in A+E was a drug addled odyssey (Me on morphine: “that was really quick!” My partner, exhausted: “We’ve been here four bloody hours!”) but even through the dubsteb beats of most of a canister of gas and air I could see they were over-run, and with a lot of people in worse nick than me (and I was not in a good state). I don’t imagine for a second there’s any difference in insurance-led health systems except a bottleneck on admission where they check credit card details. Do you really believe that nurses in a profit-led healthcare system have the time and/or inclination to sit and chat, to make a cup of tea? The private sector cherrypicks the profitable parts of healthcare, giving up when the going gets tough.

I don’t really do national pride, my being British is an accident of birth, nothing else. But I am proud and passionate about the NHS. My mum joined the NHS when I was about eight as a receptionist, and retired from it many years later as Head of Planning and Performance for a large trust. It’s not just the patients a socialised medical system works for – maybe that rise through the ranks could happen in the private sector but not very often.

The number of times I’ve seen people ask for medical advice on internet forums is astonishing. But I’ve stopped saying “go see a doctor” because too many of my US friends can’t. They can’t afford to. You have a weird lump in your boob, but you need to get your car fixed or you’ll lose your job. You feel yourself sinking back into a downward spiral of negative thoughts but talking to someone? Maybe you can get therapy when you get a better job! Seizures? Can’t get them checked out, your insurance won’t cover it. When my sister had her spine sorted out there was another girl having the same surgery. The family were American, they’d moved here (permanently) because back home they couldn’t afford the surgery. They were a nice, middle class family – who in their birth country could not afford to stop their daughter becoming a hunchback.

It’s only in comparison to this that I luxuriate in my free GPs appointments, free contraception. Nye Bevan said “The collective principle asserts that no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.” When I was first recovering from my ankle surgery I looked at the scars, the swelling, the lumps of titanium pushing out against the flesh with sadness – I used to have nice ankles. Now I look down and think “there’s civilisation”.

Thank you NHS.

The inspiration for this post:

Actor Michael Sheen,  made this brilliant speech about Nye Bevan and the NHS. It really is great, I recommend you watch the whole thing. It’s only a matter of time before the Tory knives come out for him (spoiler, he lives in LA! Which is probably nicer than where you live! OK he does that for work and to be near his kid, but it’s sunnier there than Newport. How dare he?! Champagne socialist!) He also presented a brilliant programme on the Chartists on BBC2 Wales last week, which you should also watch. And watch The Damned United while you are at it. It doesn’t have anything to do with the NHS but it’s a great film.