the NHS

Our National Health Service (the brainchild of a Welsh politician after WWII) is creaking and breaking.  Years of cuts and lack of investment in grass roots health care have left it in a sorry state.

I know this to be the case as a couple of weeks ago I had to wait 7 hours for an ambulance – and not for the first time.

Whenever anyone starts to criticize it though, I feel duty bound to spring to its defence.  They have nursed me through cancer and a heart condition and have always been there for us as a family whenever we’ve needed them.  And only later today I have my latest check up after my stem-cell transplant of four years ago.

But, and this is a big but, the recent long wait for a paramedic is worrying.

In February 2015 I suffered a near fatal pulmonary embolism and was rushed to hospital.  I didn’t have to wait long for an ambulance – they were there within 10 minutes.  But once I was in A&E though it became apparent that they were struggling badly.  Within a couple of hours things had got so bad that patients were being treated in a queue of ambulances outside the hospital as there were no beds available at all; anywhere in the hospital.

what would he think?

The doctor treating me “joked” that I was lucky, as had my PE occurred later in the day I probably wouldn’t have survived it as there would have been no ambulances to convey me to hospital; and such was the state of my back after its surgery, combined with the effects of the PE, that I wouldn’t have been able to get to the car even to make my own way there.

It’s extremely worrying.

And now the talk is of “back-door” privatisation, but only of the more lucrative parts of the service of course.  This cannot be allowed to happen.  Health care should be free at the point of delivery for everyone.  To achieve this though, the years of cuts need to be reversed, and the money that is available spent more wisely on medical provision, and not on administration.

Aneurin Bevan is no doubt spinning in his grave.