We mustn’t forget NHS heroes when this is over
I’M going to let you into a secret. I have stopped watching the news. Oh, I keep up with things – I’m a journalist so it’s my job to be across the strange new world in which we now live. But whereas a few weeks ago I caught every bulletin, social media update, headline – now? Not so much.
I know others have done the same, worn down by the relentlessness of it all. Me? My reasons are a bit more personal.
My son is an A&E nurse in a major inner city hospital. He also happens to have Type 1 diabetes.
And while the current crisis would induce anxiety in even the most sanguine of people, the tsunami of images of folk on ventilators, of stories of medical staff catching the virus – or worse – and headlines about a lack of protection equipment for NHS workers were threatening to tip me over the edge.
Of course, if I had my way I would chain him to the radiator in his bedroom and not allow him out, but apparently there are laws against that.
Also, when I did suggest he might step back from the front-line – find a nice job counting paperclips in an office somewhere, perhaps – he fixed me with a glare that would stop a rhino.
“It’s my job,” was all he would say.
Yes, I wanted to cry. It’s your job but you’re my son and I’m frightened.
But you don’t, do you? You can’t tell them anything when they’re 22. So now I ask him just enough about his day not to induce that familiar feeling of low level panic and I avert my eyes from the statistics about the number of medics with the virus.
And like the rest of us, I thank God for people like him.
Last week – was it only last week – we all stood on our doorsteps and clapped the NHS workforce.
It was a poignant, emotional gesture but to be honest I was conflicted about taking part.
Of course the doctors and nurses and cleaners and porters and cooks and chief executives deserved to be recognised. They are doing an amazing job and their families too must be terrified of what they face each day in work.
But they have also deserved – for years and years and years – to have been treated better, to be funded better. Nurses have deserved not to have their bursaries removed and not have pay claims blocked.
Medics now deserve to have the right equipment – and enough of it – to protect themselves and to be tested for coronavirus as a matter of course.
They all deserve our gratitude but it’s such a pity it’s taken a crisis for so many people to realise that, politicians included.
Now, we need to look to the future, to when all this is over. We need to remember the gratitude we feel today, remember what the NHS did for us and push as hard and as far as we can to secure the investment it so sorely needs.
I’ll sure as hell lead the clapping then.