The Alchemy of the NHS

I watched Nye, the National Theater’s hit show about Aneurin Bevan, the former Labour MP for Ebbw Vale and his fight to found a national health service, twice. Both times it left me feeling a bit queasy. Bevan is a mighty working-class hero. probably no other minister, even in that 1945 government of heroes, would have had the vision, the muscle or the sheer energy to make a national health service happen at all in those bleak postwar years, let alone in a way that no incoming government could unpick.

The NHS sits at the heart of politics and for most of my career in journalism, and charting the crises, the numbers, the arguments, the possibilities and the costs was a staple of my work. You can write all that,you can read about all that,but it can feel very different when events dictate that you cross the line from commentator to patient; when,like me,you pitch up as someone who arrives as an emergency,with a condition that might require major surgery and at least a week of post-operative hospital care – or might just go away of its own accord.

There are other places in the world, I suppose, were you crawl into the emergency department wanting to die and are met with warmth and sympathy, competent professionals in more or less functional surroundings. It’s not, or not just, the security of not having to worry about the bill, because there are other ways of funding healthcare that are free at the point of use. I won’t pretend mine is a unique experience, or that all experiences are like mine, but proximity is critically important: having had the time to watch a ward at work, I feel there is alchemy in play here, and after six days with nothing to do but lie relatively flat and ponder, I think I may have identified it.

at its heart is the sense of a shared destination. It’s like getting on a bus, maybe not the sleekest model and definately overloaded, but we’re all on the journey together. Everyone who’s seriously and unexpectedly ill comes here. Everyone. You don’t lie in your narrow hospital bed imagining the four-star facilities you might be enjoying if only you had more dosh, because it’s odds on that if it’s an emergency, that person too is just behind the curtain hanging limply to your right.

So there’s a common purpose among us all, and we all want to get to the other end. You don’t really want to die, at least not without some pain relief first, and they don’t want you to die either and are doing their damnedest to help.