One of my childhood dreams was to get to ride in an ambulance. It took me until I was 60 until I achieved this dream. If dream is the right way to describe it..
After preparing last weeks blog for publication at 2pm on Monday I climbed into bed on Tuesday night with a little shoulder pain. The shoulder pain had been there all week and I had assumed that I’d pulled a muscle going hang gliding, abseiling or cross country running (I have only ever done any of these activities in my dreams).
By 6am the pain in my shoulder had got so bad that I couldn’t sit up, let alone stand up and walk. So… I called the emergency oncology team at my local hospital. Having established that I wasn’t going to be able to drive, I called 999 (the UK’s emergency call number for health, fire and police emergencies).
Believing the British media rhetoric I settled down to wait many hours for an ambulance to turn up. However, 20 minutes later a crew of three paramedics were in my bedroom assessing me.
Fast forward two hours, having been ECG’d, blood pressure checked and tested in many other ways and given pain relief so that I was able to move again, I was in the back of an ambulance being slowly (and bumpily) driven across the city. I was soon unloaded and was trundling into the oncology day unit.
Having been settled into a hospital bed, I spent the day being tested, examined, having my pain attended to and feeling very well cared for.
Eventually I was sent home with a bottle of Morphine to take orally, and a recommendation to self administrator the Morphine every four hours if I needed to.
Now, I know that up until now you could call this blog a bit self indulgent. However my reason for writing this is that I think it’s important to counter the widely shared recent sentiment that the NHS is broken.
Yes, you can argue that it’s not running as well as it might, and that the workforce is under pressure. But at the same time it’s full of passionate, hard working people doing an amazing job for many different reasons.
Take the student paramedic who carried out most of my assessment. She told me that when she was younger, she had had a very serious accident. The paramedics who saved her life, were the inspiration that helped her choose to train to become a paramedic herself.
The nurse who cared for me was one of many internationally recruited nurses who have looked after me over the past couple of years. On many occasions they have explained that in their countries of origin, you wouldn’t get any treatment until you had presented the nurse, doctor or allied health professional with your credit card – and proved that you had enough money to pay for your treatment.
The doctor who looked after me, spent most of their day working out what was going on inside my body. What struck me most about them was that each time they came to see me, they didn’t stand looming over me to explain what they were doing, they crouched down at my bedside so they were in conversation with me face to face – seeing me as an equal, who had every right to be fully engaged in all decisions about my treatment plan.
Whilst my experience of the NHS might not be the one that the politicians and the media might want you to hear, I don’t think it’s that unusual. In my mind the ‘broken’ narrative plays into the hands of those who see the NHS as the next big publicly owned asset ripe for privatisation. Yet when we look at the national health service it’s already one of the most efficient and cost effective health services in the world.
What we mustn’t be trapped into thinking is that private is good and public is bad. I don’t have a problem with people making money from delivering social care or health care. I do have a problem with the media and some politicians telling us that the only way to ‘save’ the NHS is to put more of it into the private sector and that private sector practices must be adopted across the NHS if it is going to succeed in the future.
Frankly, that’s utter rubbish. The NHS is one of the best health care services in the world because it attracts passionate, hard working, visionary, caring people who are inspired by others to enable people to stay alive and have the best lives they can.
Ok its not perfect. But don’t let anyone tell you it is broken because it is not.
Jim Thomas
December 2024
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