Almost a decade ago, I took my notebook and pen to the Urgent Care Centre at Croydon University Hospital in South London.
“Did you know,” I asked a man on crutches smoking outside, “that you’re being treated by Richard Branson’s Virgin?”
“Virgin’s telly,” he said. “I’ve got it at home.”
A man with a black eye looked at me like I was an idiot. “Look up there, love,” he said. He read the letters out slowly. “N.H.S.”
The sign did say NHS, and so did the nurses’ lanyards. But it wasn’t the NHS who employed the staff – or an NHS security guard who threw me out shortly afterwards. It was Virgin, the telly, planes and holiday people running urgent care.
I had plenty of time to think about this recently when I spent several hours in my local A&E, King’s College Hospital, after collapsing with pneumonia.
I’ve reported from hospitals across the globe and sometimes in war zones, but the scenes inside the Emergency Department were still shocking.
Every cubicle was full with elderly patients lined up on trolleys in a corridor while exhausted paramedics stood with them for many hours.
On social media and in the Tory press you often read that the NHS is not fit for purpose. This is totally untrue. It’s our government that’s not fit for purpose. The NHS is as it always is – world-leading, efficient and kind.
Attached to a drip on the plastic chair where I sat waiting, I couldn’t stop noticing how good-humoured all the staff were, cheerfully dealing with a homeless lady on the floor, running to help someone who had collapsed, calmly warning frightened people they had many hours to wait ahead.
The nurse who took out my cannula was the same one who had put it in several hours earlier, long after she was supposed to have left.
Many thousands of people have stories far more distressing than mine this winter, but the NHS needs you to know this isn’t some kind of natural disaster. The crisis in A&E is an emergency, but it’s not an accident.
When in power, the Tories always lead an all-out assault on the NHS. It’s a long and ignoble Tory tradition which began when Churchill’s Conservative Party voted against the NHS’s creation a staggering 21 times.
The concept of a National Health Service is running sore for ideologues who can’t bear to see state-run services succeed. And since 2010 there have been 13 years of hurt. Pay cuts, underfunding, savage cuts to training. And encouragements for piranha-like private companies to snap up limbs and appendages. A decade on, Virgin no longer has the contract in Croydon.
Four months after my piece warning about non-NHS staff running urgent care, a woman, 30-year-old Madhumita Mandal – died after a medically untrained receptionist decided she “wasn’t that sick”.
Following the scandal and a damning Care Quality Commission report, Virgin lost the contract to the Croydon Urgent Care Alliance, an alliance mainly of GPs.
But elsewhere, the private sector has doubled its hold on the NHS. No wonder when so many Tory MPs benefit from donations from health-care companies and many even have second jobs with these firms.
Last March, Oluwole Kolade was made a deputy chair of NHS England. In just over a decade, Kolade has donated £859,342 to the Conservative Party. He also runs Livingbridge, a private equity firm that specialises in health care.
The privatisation of Britain’s beloved NHS has happened hand in glove with cynical austerity measures unleashed by George Osborne in 2010. Austerity smashed the system so privatisation could rush to the rescue.
By March 2012, the Tories had introduced the Health and Social Care Act to force open the NHS to “extended market-based principles”. Five health secretaries in the last four years have only added to the embarrassment of our national pride and joy.
TV’s 24 Hours in A&E used to be a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Now it’s a regular headline. The President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr Adrian Boyle, says 500 deaths a week are being caused by A&E delays. Yesterday, the Mirror heard the devastating story of Iqbal Rahman from daughter Minnie. The 58-year-old died waiting for an ambulance on Christmas Eve. Minnie directly blamed 13 years of Tory government for the “disastrous state” of the NHS.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak may be registered with a private GP practice, but for the rest of us, the three letters “NHS” are stitched carefully into the scar tissue of our lives.
I’ve come to know King’s well over the years, as a reporter and patient. My son was born there in 2010, and my twin niece and nephew were in special care at the hospital. My daughter was born at its sister hospital St Thomas’s, its buildings in view of the very MPs who have torn apart the NHS.
It’s been sublime and ridiculous. In summer 2019, I ended up at A&E after a Devon water spider made a home in my ear following a spot of wild swimming. This particular admission made two triage nurses scream.
On Boxing Day 2015, I was admitted for an emergency operation for a strangulated hernia – a life-threatening condition. There were no beds, and I spent three days – some on a trolley in a store-room area – waiting for a surgeon to be available.
That week, the local Labour MP Tessa Jowell was warning the hospital was harbouring the equivalent of an entire ward of elderly people waiting for social-care packages.
I wrote from hospital that: “as we approach the election, our battered health service stands on the brink of privatisation that will disfigure it forever…”
Almost 10 years later, Tessa Jowell’s name is proudly emblazoned on our health centre following her tragic death from brain cancer. And the NHS is being maintained only by the good will and expertise of extraordinary staff.
There is a quote often attributed to NHS founder Nye Bevan: “The NHS will last as long as there’s folk with faith left to fight for it.”
This is a fight, literally, to the death.
