Protecting the NHS is not just a slogan
CORONAVIRUS has taught us lots of things: How to make passable banana bread; the illogical way human beings respond to a crisis by panic-buying toilet rolls and the importance of spending time outdoors to calm the mind and exercise the body.
But one lesson has been driven home harder than most – our huge and growing reliance on experts in the medical profession to look after us when we are sick and administer the vaccine that will protect us from becoming ill.
It is blindingly obvious – yet too often ignored – that the over-riding reason for doing all we can to avoid catching the virus is so we, or those we come into contact with, don’t need to make use of precious NHS resources.
The first and most powerful message to come out of the crisis, Stay Home; Save Lives; Protect the NHS said it most clearly. Yet even now, 10 months after the pandemic first reared its head, I hear 70-, 80 – and 90-year-olds saying: “Oh no, don’t give me the jab; let the young have it first, they’re the workers, they have their whole lives ahead of them...”
All very laudable. Except it is those older folk who will be laid the lowest by Covid-19 and who are most likely to need round-the-clock care in an intensive care ward. To be blunt, if those who are 90-plus caught coronavirus one day and died calmly and peacefully in their sleep that night it would not be such a problem.
Yet the progress of the disease is rather slower and its most distressing symptoms, chronic shortness of breath and coughing, requires the most invasive and expensive care.
That’s why, today, health professionals and those who run our hospitals are more worried than they have been throughout this whole crisis.
Ironically, the fact they now know more about how to control the disease adds to the pressure. Patients are living longer; intensive care beds and the brilliant and dedicated staff who work around them are occupied for longer. It’s very good news that survival rates are improving, but – like every medical breakthrough that means patients can live longer lives with doctors managing their sicknesses – it increases rather than relieves the pressure on the NHS.
Having watched my father succumb to, and then survive, a horrible case of sepsis nearly two years ago I know the amount of sophisticated medical equipment and expert nursing that goes into keeping a patient in their 80s alive and then nursing them back to health when they are critically ill.
All the effort is definitely worthwhile. My Dad is enjoying a new burst of life and energy. He and my mother are about to have their second coronavirus jabs and are looking forward to the freedom to travel and meet friends and family again. But knowing that level of care is now being lavished on thousands of critically ill Covid patients is sobering.
It teaches us another vital lesson that is about the only good thing – apart from the banana bread and the love of the great outdoors – that we can take away from the pandemic.
It teaches us that while we should make use of the NHS whenever we need to, and feel confident that it is there to help all of us, we have a responsibility to take good care of ourselves and our families too, in order to minimise the pressure.
In the era before health care in Britain that was free for all, people weighed up whether or not they needed the doctor because, for many, it was an expense they could ill-afford. We do not want to get back to that point. But while the NHS no longer costs us money, it still has a cost.
In the battle against coronavirus the focus is starting to shift from treatment to prevention, with the roll-out of vaccination.
That should be a springboard for all of us to take preventative measures more seriously when it comes to our general health.
It’s a time for New Year resolutions. Living healthier lives is something many resolve to do for themselves. In 2021, we should do it for the benefit of the NHS as well.
‘We should use the NHS when we need to – but we have a responsibility to look after ourselves’