My mum at 90 is in better nick than ‘our’ NHS

THIS is my last column for a few weeks. I’m taking a break to spend some time with my mum, who celebrates her 90th birthday next Thursday. With the summer silly season getting into full swing, it seems as good a time as any to put my feet up. Frankly, I can’t bring myself to read, let alone write, another word about Brexit.

The constant bleating of the remoaners and backbiting in the Cabinet is as tedious as it is depressing. Don’t these people ever take a day off? I’ve had it up to here with lobbyists, campaigners and politicians, mounting their hobby horses and advertising their own virtue.

Did you see Jeremy Corbyn in the Commons on Wednesday, sporting a giant ‘NHS 70’ badge on his lapel? It looked like one of those badges you get on children’s birthday cards. ‘I am 5’. This fatuous gesture was supposed to demonstrate just how much he cares about the health service, unlike the heartless Tories who want to close all the hospitals and sack all the doctors and nurses. Which is, obviously, why Theresa May has bunged the NHS an extra £380 million a week. But that’s what passes for mature political debate these days — ludicrous scaremongering and childish name-calling.

Coincidentally, Mum shares a birthday with the NHS. And although she’s 20 years older than the health service, she’s arguably in much better shape.

As I’ve mentioned before, Mum lives in Michigan, outside Detroit. A few years ago, I wrote about visiting her in hospital after she’d had a nasty car accident.

She owes her life to the superb care she received at the privately run William Beaumont Hospital. I’m convinced that if she’d still lived in England and had been at the mercy of the NHS, she wouldn’t be alive today.

Yagain, in the past week, we’ve read about the callous treatment meted out to elderly patients. you certainly couldn’t call it ‘care’.

The over-70s are not supposed to be denied operations and lifeextending medicines on the grounds of cost. But in hospital, having been deprived food and drink, they are effectively left to die.

The latest NHS scandal involves the premature deaths of thousands of older people, as a result of being pumped full of a fatal overdose of powerful opiates dispensed by faulty syringe pumps.

It’s being called the worst coverup in NHS history, and only came to light after it was revealed that 450 people had their lives cut short at Gosport War Memorial Hospital, in Hampshire. Other related deaths are believed to have occurred at hospitals in Wales, yorkshire, Devon, Derbyshire, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

It’s claimed that, despite warnings, the faulty equipment has been in widespread use for the past 30 years. Dr Jane Barton, who was responsible for the administering of the drugs at Gosport, was first interviewed about the problem back in 2003.

yet, although the dangers were known at the time, the NHS chose to bury the findings of the investigation and the syringes continued to be used until 2015. Dr Barton broke cover this week, but let her husband do the talking. She refuses to apologise and claims she has done nothing wrong.

This is despite the fact that an official report into the Gosport scandal concluded there was a ‘disregard for human life and a culture of shortening the lives of a large number of patients’.

There are calls for Dr Barton to be prosecuted, but she’s only a symptom of a far wider malaise. The NHS is a vast, unaccountable bureaucracy, where passing the buck is standard operating procedure. No one ever takes responsibility for anything.

yet rather than address the fundamental problems, the politicians’ answer is always to throw more money at the wall in the hope that some might stick.

Grandstanding, and wearing soppy badges, is so much easier than grasping the nettle.

We keep kidding ourselves that the NHS is the ‘envy of the world’. And so it might be to those from the Third World who know they can fly here and receive free treatment, no questions asked, even though they have not paid a penny into the system.

BUT that’s not how it looks to the rest of the developed world, especially the U.S. The insurancebased American system of health care may be far from perfect, but it delivers much better outcomes.

I find it impossible to imagine that in the States thousands of patients would be allowed to die over three decades because equipment used to administer opiates was faulty. And when it emerged subsequently that the truth had been covered up for many years, it wouldn’t only be the doctor responsible in the dock.

The hospital’s CEO and board of directors would be serving 25 years for corporate manslaughter.

yet what’s the betting that here in Britain, no one in authority will ever carry the can for the thousands of premature deaths at Gosport and elsewhere?

Another report this week said patients who regularly see the same doctor stand a far better chance of living longer. you should be so lucky. In the NHS, seeing the same GP is becoming increasingly impossible. That’s if you can get an appointment at all.

In the States, my mum’s treatment has been overseen and co-ordinated by the same GP for years. When she was in hospital, he visited her every day, even over the Thanksgiving holiday.

It’s thanks to him and the American healthcare system that she’s around to celebrate her 90th birthday next week.

If she’d had the misfortune to rely on the NHS, I fear it might have been a different story.