What I saw at a Christmas market this weekend was heartbreaking
We all get a great deal out of the NHS, and therefore we should all put into it, writes Harriet Williamson
On a Saturday jaunt through London, my partner and I stumbled across a small festive market, complete with an elf on stilts festooned with Christmas lights. Wandering past the stalls, I noticed a woman wearing a Santa hat and a “save the NHS” T-shirt, holding a collection bucket. And I felt terribly sad.
No shade at all intended to the people who give up their weekends to campaign for our NHS. They are taking action. What is so depressing to me is that the National Health Service, once the envy of the world, is in an entirely avoidable position that has resulted in people being out with collection buckets in defence of it. The NHS has healed us, and now it is the wounded one.
When I was 19, the NHS saved my life. While I was unconscious in intensive care, wavering on the boundary between being and not being, I’m told that a nurse gently washed my hair. The skill, the competence and the kindness of NHS staff enabled me to go home less than a week later.
We all get a great deal out of the NHS – and therefore, we should all put into it. Not via charity, which is unsustainable – but through taxation, which polling repeatedly shows is a popular choice with the public.
The NHS is there throughout our lives – from birth to death – and sometimes we take it for granted. No one can be blind to the squeeze on services – from ambulance waiting times to the difficulty of accessing mental health support. I saw first-hand how a county hospital became a “lobster trap” for my beloved grandad, who died last month. The Independent’s Daily Edition editor, Alastair Jamieson, has written poignantly for Voices about his own experience of “lobster trap” hospitals.
Just over a week ago, The Daily Telegraph’s letters page led with a missive titled: “The country must accept that a ‘free at point of use’ NHS is no longer sustainable.” The writer argued that the NHS had never been free, as it is paid for by taxation – something I don’t think anyone has ever disputed – and shared that he and his wife, a GP, were taking out private medical insurance because they “can no longer trust the NHS”.
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Private healthcare is becoming more normalised for those who can afford it – from mental health interventions to physiotherapy. This “two tier” system means that, as our chief business commentator James Moore writes, those without the resources to access private care “have little choice but to suffer in silence”.
Issues of underfunding and staff shortages are indisputable. But there must still be hope – and on that note, readers may remember the How to Heal the NHS series we ran in September. We do not have to go the way of the US, as long as there is political and public will to save our health service – as it has saved so many of us.
As always, you are invited to write in via our letters page – letters@independent.co.uk – and share your views.
Yours,
Harriet Williamson
Voices commissioning editor