Valuing the NHS

I’m surprised at how regularly I meet people who complain about the NHS. To many people I suppose it is a large and relatively faceless organisation. And it does have undoubted shortcomings, such as the waiting times to see specialists for non-urgent treatment. But my experiences of the NHS have been overwhelmingly excellent and I’m always ready to speak up for it. So this week I was very sad to learn of the death of Stephen Hawking, one of the highest profile advocates and campaigners for the NHS.

Despite being diagnosed at 21 with motor neurone disease and told that he had only a short time to live, Stephen Hawking continued to work at the highest level in his field of science for a further 55 years. And he was very clear about who to thank for his long life: ‘I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment from the NHS without which I would not have survived.’ It took undoubted grit and determination too, but he consistently made light of his disability. In his later years he was an active campaigner for the NHS and used his public position to speak out against underfunding and privatisation.

Stephen Hawking’s campaigning led to several high-profile rows with Jeremy Hunt. A government minister who perhaps should be renamed in terms of the famous Radio 4 interview in which he was introduced to the listeners by James Naughtie as Jeremy Cunt. A spectacular, but hardly inappropriate, slip. The essence of the row was about the nature of the evidence that Hunt was claiming as his basis for a new health policy. If you are going to have a public argument about the nature of evidence, it was certainly inadvisable to choose to have this row with one of the best scientific minds in the UK. Suffice it to say that Hawking duly exposed major factual holes in government health policy. And in the last few months of his life he had become involved in a legal challenge to Hunt’s plans for further NHS privatisation.

Hawking’s view of the current shortcomings of the NHS was that they had arisen from persistent underfunding and creeping privatisation. In a healthcare system that is under massive and continual strain not all treatment can be delivered well at the same time. So urgent care is prioritised, which leads to unacceptable delays in non-urgent care. This has been underlined by a series of reports that have argued that long waiting times for some patients can only be improved by an injection of new funding.

Over the past seven years, I’ve had four major surgical procedures and have spent ten weeks in four different acute hospitals. As a cancer patient I was a priority. The treatment I received was of the highest quality and in the main it was very successful. I have been all-clear of cancer for sixteen months and I will be scanned every four months to make sure that I continue along this road. Whilst my story is not as spectacular as that of Stephen Hawking, my treatment has been life-saving and I have nothing but praise for the work of the NHS. For despite being under great pressure they do a fantastic job.