Mothers Day made me think, just for a short while mind - as the rest of the day was spent trying to ‘look’ as though I was doing extra to prevent my wife from having to do too much. But think I did.
Everybody in this wonderful country of ours will have been touched by the greatness of the NHS, either directly or indirectly. It has been there for us all, trips to the GP for run of the mill ailments, dashes to A&E for… well Accidents and Emergencies, and routine hospital appointments for those routine medical treatments. Sadly it would appear that in a few years time we may all wake up and not have this gigantic safety net to our lives. I could go into reasons why this is happening but they seem pretty well documented all over the interweb. I guess the crux of my point here is that more or less we all get our money’s worth. I know that a machine as gargantuan as the NHS will have its weak points, this is to be expected, and yes it should strive to be a smooth running, lean 100% success rate entity. This is unrealistic I think. But as far as I can tell it does pretty darn well.
The ideological changes that are proposed seem to be akin to looking at a large clock that, on occasion, runs a little slow. Instead of giving it a good oil and a tighten here and there, more commonly known as a full service on regular occasions, it has been decided that we should just tear out some old bits and stick in some new potentially incompatible parts. Parts that won’t come with a warranty, parts that are not designed to work in sympathy with the larger model, parts that will require their own regular system of checking, parts that will be unable to communicate with the rest of the machine. I would like to be proven incorrect.
My own experiences with the NHS are many, some good, some not so good. It is worth mentioning here that the not so good were still pretty good and that if you are not getting the information/service you feel you should be, you need to be vocal about it, people have a tendency to moan to family and friends, when a little polite moan to the manager does wonders. The NHS cannot improve if they don’t know what they are doing wrong.
But let’s concentrate on the good. The frontline cuts that are happening could have prevented me from having a wife and two children. There are 30 maternity wards undergoing or at risk from closure along with many A&E dpeartments, let alone what is happening to PCTs, the least that should happen is that A&Es are kept open to cope with the potential disasters that the PCT chaos will cause.
Several years ago my wife was rushed to hospital with placental abruption. Sooo much blood! She was rushed into emergency surgery where our doctor… hang on I have to add this point…our doctor had been Saddam Hussein’s obstetrician and had been smuggled out of Iraq with her two children in suitcases because her and her husband had refused to bend to his will and were going to be sentenced to death…(this is a longer story, I have simplified it). Anyway, there we are, wife haemorrhaging like a crazy bleeding thing and Ginger getting more and more distressed, our Doctor starts barking orders at people to move just a little bit quicker in order to save both mother and child. Ginger is born at 29 weeks weighing 1lbs 15oz. There had been a knot in the umbilical cord hence she was so small. Off Ginger went to intensive care for 10 weeks, we learnt to be parents by changing her little body through holes in her ice cream tub (incubator). There were ups and downs, we were zombies for most of the time. Occasional light relief came in doing little voices for her when the Doctors did their rounds, and then there was the competition for space in the freezer for pumped breast milk. You would walk onto the ward in the morning and there would be 10 women pumping their boobs for all it was worth, labelling it up and jamming it in the only spaces left in the freezer… a mammary, sorry memory that will never leave me. If anyone wants to help out a NICU/PICU ward ask them if they need a new freezer, I bet they say yes. All the care was second to none, from absolutely everyone involved. And on top of the care was the advice, in particular from one nurse, as we were stood crying over Ginger’s tub, ‘Why are you crying? Who is that going to help? She needs parents not people crying, pull yourselves together and get on with it.’ Advice doesn’t get more useful than this. Ginger is growing up (way too quickly), my wife survived and we now have a second child, Blondie.
So all in all the NHS did us proud. There will be others in the same position as us in the near future, but they won’t have the same joyful outcome because their maternity ward won’t exist, they won’t have Doctors available, or an accountant will have decided that those lives are not profitable enough to save because they will involve spending more money than they are prepared to allocate in that quarter.
So what does the NHS need? In my humble opinion, it needs oiling, it needs regular check-ups. It doesn’t need replacement parts that may never be delivered, leaving a hole that will never be filled and that will put lives at risk.
And to think after all this, all Ginger and Blondie bought their mother was a tin coffee pot.
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