Chapter 8 The Health of the Nation
©GeraldineBanksJune2024
I must put down my phone and ignore the current election tittle tattle and look at the Health of the Nation, or even Global Health. Journalists and Influencers tend to concentrate on the extremes of Health and Diet. The poor old NHS in the UK has to deal with the reality of a nation who either don’t understand how their own bodies work or think a pill will cure everything .
Healthcare work is a vocation, it is not a job. The people who do it well are definitely motivated to care for people. Yet everyone in Europe and even the World (well particularly America) , will recognise that the NHS is now one of the biggest Businesses in Europe and indeed all the talk of Privatisation of Healthcare comes from those who see it as a “Business Opportunity” not an organisation to look after the Health of the Nation.
Currently in the election debacle , there will be people who want to be elected who believe the only solution to being able to pay for the NHS is to privatise some of it’s more lucrative functions, oh and I should say to leave the expensive, potentially crippling expensive bits in the public domain. That’s entrepreneurship eh?
In some areas, eg. dentistry this feels as if it’s already happened. There are fewer and fewer dentists willing to take on NHS patients and an increase in insurance backed Dental Policies from the Private Sector. The joke is , you ask a NHS patient on the cost of their dental care (and actually it is quite a lot of money) . It is quite out of reach of people on low income or the unemployed.
Are teeth and appearance important to people, does it not affect their lives? Yes, probably in all areas. It’s as good as putting a stamp on someone’s forehead, saying
“I’m poor”
Let’s face it if you want to appear on television, your teeth will need fixed, if you want to be a pop star, you’ll need your teeth fixed.( The late great Shane McGowan of Pogues fame being the exception) .
Will the candidate at a job interview who has a nice smile and fresh breath do better than the one who doesn’t smile and has bad breath. So whatever administrator pressed the button on reducing the amount of care available for Dental Work may have indirectly affected the mental health of a significant portion of the population and reduced the effectiveness of the economy.
My point being is that the NHS as an entity should have a positive impact on the total population. It drives me mad when Celebrities go on about that ‘s it a “National Treasure” and that when they had a problem, that the NHS was there to sort it out like no one else could have done. Even Royalty sometimes needs the NHS, though for security reasons they tend to use the Private Sector. These people are only looking at what it does for them and not the total population. This is not what Aneurin Bevan intended.
The NHS is now the biggest employer in Europe, they lap up excess labour in the market in the UK. I for one, once temped in the Finance Department of a local hospital. One night when I finished work and was going home at 5 pm I found out my motorbike battery was flat. I was rescued in the hospital car park by the AA (formerly known as the Fourth Emergency Service). The man was full of praise for the NHS and me.
” I couldn’t do what you do , you’re amazing”. He beamed as he set up the leads to start the battery.
Not wishing him to be mislead , I told him I only worked in the finance department and I tried not to let my cynicism shine through. Where I worked was actually over staffed, incompetent and the proportion of administrative management roles far outweighed the cost and numbers of “caring roles”.
Not many workplaces offer paid non-working days to their staff , I thought to myself. As he drove away , he was so happy that he had helped one of the “good ones”. I was thinking if only he knew. I was close to leaving the job , because the bullying was so bad. One women had me lined up for debt collecting role that she didn’t want to do. There was no future for me there.
There is the rub though , we love our NHS and we like to think it’s the best in the World with the best hard working caring people in it ( bit like the Post Office eh?).Well it is really , the amount of good work that Nurses ,Doctors and Health Care Professionals want to do is amazing. I just wish we’d let them do it. Instead it has turned into the greatest Bureaucracy on Earth, separated into individual Trusts run by Chief Executives on phenomenal salaries and part-time Board members also on large salaries, contributing their opinions on how to run a hospital or health centre having no knowledge or experience of running or working in either. What happened to the ” National ” bit?
Somehow Paula Vennels after the debacle in the Post Office managed to get a plumb job advising a NHS Trust, thankfully she was removed from the role , but how and why was she appointed in the first place. How many of these types of predatory leeches are in the National Health Service, that’s not to say that there aren’t good leeches , cleaning wounds and stopping clotting in the real NHS. Medicine is amazing , let it be amazing and get rid of all these hangers on.
So what is the solution, we all want the NHS, we all want it to do well and for it to excel at what it does best. Caring for the Nation’s Health. Well actually there is really good work going on , particularly in the realm of preventative medicine. The Well Men and Well Woman initiatives, to help people understand how to help themselves are really forward looking.
We can look after ourselves and our health, by eating well and not abusing our bodies with drugs and alcohol. Education is part of the NHS’s role, not lecturing people or refusing to treat them should things go wrong. We should look at the numbers, most people do want to be healthy and if you give them the right information and support will make an effort to .
There is a manageable cost to that , perhaps all these TV Doctors who have successful media careers in the Private Sector because they saw a need and an income stream. They saw a niche and they pursued it . Now the NHS has Apps and programmes encouraging more people to take an active interest in their Health. The TV Doctors were acting like Public Health Broadcasters, paid ones of course, however, if you can’t afford the TV Licence or the Netflix Subscription , then you have your NHS.
Increasingly Mental Health has came into play, I’ve noticed this particularly in the various workplaces that I’ve worked in. It always makes me laugh, that the very people who cause unnecessary stress in the workplace are the very ones who are put in charge or communicating the “look after yourself strategy”.
However, once we enable people to feel comfortable in their environment, to earn enough money to live and to have decent housing and basically a “life” a lot of these mental health challenges will go away, saving the NHS a fortune. It is, afterall ,the NHS who picks up the pieces when mental health challenges become unmanageable.
So there comes the Economic Rub, the NHS is being targeted to be privatised at the same time it’s users are being challenged by an economy which leaves them feeling economically unstable, whether it’s because they can’t afford their rent, their food or because they have turned to unhealthy support systems such as as drugs or alcohol just to survive which I covered in Chapter 3. In other words the NHS doesn’t stand a chance unless those who can look after themselves.
The real job of the NHS is to look after those who cannot look after themselves and that I’m afraid is a cost that will always and should always come out of the Public Purse. The Private Sector does not care whether Mrs Smith down the road needs a coronary by-pass in order to survive. Their AI will tell them that she isn’t part of the plan for the future and that the cost is prohobitive , so best let her illness run it’s course and anyway she didn’t listen to the advice she was given. That is how the private sector thinks.
The private Sector have extended that thinking, so that anyone who does not meet their criteria of being rich, good looking , thin and superhuman really just has to get on with it and that well if they are that unlucky they are unlucky. Perhaps next time , they’ll place a bet on Ladbrokes on the chances of their survival.
The NHS on the other hand was created to let more people be able to live well and survive crisis’s where it’s humanely possible to treat them. The two philosophies are so different it is impossible to see them combine.
Let the NHS do what it’s best at , and stop trying to run it like a business. The Nation’s Health is it’s business.
thenotsomightyom 