Our health service is the glue that holds the nation together
OVER three months last year this country reeled from a series of pummelling blows that claimed more than 100 lives and left hundreds more seriously injured.
The terror attacks on Westminster, Manchester, London Bridge and Finsbury Park, plus the deadly blaze at Grenfell Tower, tested the resolve of our people over a prolonged period like no time since the Blitz.
Reporting from some of those scenes of devastation, one particular sentiment kept surfacing through the torrent of pain and anger: That the medical teams who had to pick up the pieces went way beyond the call of duty.
After the Manchester bomb, while other emergency services were held back due to fear of a second explosion, advanced paramedics were in the arena dealing with dozens of horrifically injured concert-goers, despite knowing another device could go off at any moment.
They stabilised the victims, triaged them, then sent them to the specialist hospitals they needed to be in, where beds were freed up in advance.
Amid the chaos, courage and professionalism of the highest order shone.
Every Greater Manchester hospital reported staff showing up for work regardless of whether they were due in, and many who were there were doing double or triple shifts. Not just doctors, nurses and surgeons but technicians, pharmacists, radiologists, paediatricians, social workers, registrars, consultants, psychologists, porters and catering staff.
The front-line workers were dealing with battlefield wounds that most had never seen before, yet they toiled on through the horror and fatigue without complaint.
COMPASSION
Dr David McCarthy, a consultant anaesthetist at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, wrote a post on Facebook the next day that could also have been written by a member of his profession after any of the London attacks: “The response from my colleagues represented everything great about this country. Compassion. Empathy. Tireless self-sacrifice and above all profound unity.
“Dozens upon dozens attended to help. Staff from almost every imaginable background, race and religion came together and put their all into caring for those wounded.” What price can you put on that kind of dedication? What level of gratitude from the rest of us begins to do it justice?
The actions of all those NHS staff were the very definition of heroic. And they take place not just when major tragedies strike, but every hour of every day in every hospital in the land.
Which is why, as our greatest national treasure prepares to turn 70, the Mirror, together with ITV, on Monday will host the first televised NHS Heroes Awards at London’s Hilton Hotel to recognise the remarkable people who provide us with the ultimate comfort blanket.
The health service was there for me a year ago when I suffered chest pains, dialled the NHS Helpline and within five minutes of my call an ambulance arrived. Within another five, paramedics were telling me it was touch and go whether I’d had a heart attack so they were taking me to the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital.
There I was met by a five-strong specialist team who ran scans and tests before concluding it was an inflammation of the sac around the heart, so they were putting me back in the ambulance and on to another hospital for blood tests.
The ambulance passed Alder Hey, where, hours after my first child was born in 1990, he underwent a lifesaving kidney operation. Over the next few weeks as he lay in an incubator, I lived in a family room and witnessed a level of 24-hour-a-day care, love and medical expertise that left me awestruck. It carried on for 24 years until he needed a new kidney, which I was lucky enough to be able to give him at the Royal Liverpool Hospital, witnessing in my week-long stay there levels of commitment, genius, love and humour from surgeons to cleaners that summed up the unique ethos of the NHS.
Like many of you, I see its introduction in 1948 – when Britain became the first country in the world to provide universal healthcare free at the point of delivery – as our greatest achievement. And we’re not alone.
The last report by the US-based Commonwealth Fund, which studies health provision in every major country, judged the NHS to be the “world’s best care system”. It’s why, when Donald Trump incorrectly tweeted in February that thousands were marching in London because our health system was broke, it met with the fiercest of backlashes. Many took pride and pleasure pointing out that despite the US spending 16.6% of GDP on health compared to our 9.9%, life expectancy for Brits is 2.5 years greater than for Americans. And they have 28 million people uninsured compared to our none.
All this is not to say that the NHS is perfect. Far from it. The model may be close to Utopian, but over recent years due to gross underfunding, mismanagement, shambolic “reforms”, low pay driving away workers, plus an ideological desire by the Tory government to chip away at its foundations and principles leaving it rife for privatisation, it has flat-lined. Parts of it hover close to needing life support.
We’ve all experienced, or heard horror stories about, four-hour trolley waits in A&E, breast cancer screening scandals and the social care crisis that causes chronic bed-blocking, to name but a few problems.
HORROR
But those disgraces should make us all the more determined to ensure that as the NHS hits three score and 10, we put it right for the next 70 years. And the horror stories can be consigned to history because I’ve seen it happen.
In 2002 I watched my mum die from cancer in Whiston Hospital. Or rather saw her spend her last days in a Victorian slum, after being stuck first on a mixed ward, then in a Bedlam-like women’s geriatric ward. It was heartbreaking.
But a decade later, with the old hospital demolished and a new one built, I watched my dad die not in a slum but in a single occupancy, en-suite room that a private-paying patient would have envied. Unlike my mum, Reg died with peace and dignity.
The reason being that a Labour government had committed the money to turn a Third World hospital into a first-class one. We can do that right across the NHS if the politicians listen to the people and act.
Last September, Ipsos Mori found that 77% of Britons believe that “the NHS is crucial to British society and we must do everything to maintain it” with 66% saying they’re willing “to pay more taxes in order to maintain the level of spending needed”.
Other polls have shown that no British institution, including the monarchy and the armed forces, command that level of unconditional love from the people. Because we know, in our hearts, that the NHS is the glue that holds our nation together.
Let’s hear it for the unsung heroes in our midst who make that happen every hour of every day.