I'm prompted to ask this after my daring to question junior doctors in another thread, and the general outrage such comments cause. It wasn't particularly bad this time, but generally, if anyone makes any negative comments about the NHS, they are treated like they've fucked the pope.
What is it that causes such reaction? Is it because the NHS employs SO many people that nearly everyone has a family member or friend or neighbour who works for them?
Any suggestion that the NHS could be improved by some change or other, is pounced upon. And god help anyone who suggests - shock horror - maybe the private sector could do some of the work!?! You'd be rounded up and shot if some had their way.
If the service the NHS gave was amazing, it would be easier to understand. But the waiting times are terrible, the availability of leading edge treatments and facilities "patchy" to downright poor. And the clinical outcomes for things like cancer, woeful. In short, it's pretty poor to be honest.
People who work there are all "angels" or "heros" or whatever. Despite the fact they *chose* to go into the profession and they get paid for doing so. They weren't press-ganged into it. But dare to suggest that some nurses are lazy sods for whom picking up crap off the floor or doing some other actually important task, is beneath them.
You go up to the average nursing station on the average ward and 3 or 4 of them will blank you for 10 minutes. If any shop treated you like that, you'd walk out. But when the NHS does it, they are marvellous.
Why no such love-in for the chemical engineering industry? How about passionately sticking up for airport security staff who do such an amazing job preventing those nasty terrorists?
Nope, the NHS is rank average at best, and the sooner people can stop romanticising and face up to the fact, the sooner we can start thinking about how we can get a better health service for all of us.
Worked for the NHS, admitting bias right away.
People who work for the NHS are seen as heros and angels because they do a job that is on the whole pretty abhorrent. You get covered in piss and shit and bodily fluids on a daily basis. When its not vile it can be emotionally tolling on a level that is difficult to understand if you've not been there. Personally I'll take getting covered in vomit from a pensioner with a gastro bleed any day over watching the light leave a mothers eyes as she realises the chest compressions aren't doing a fucking thing for her child. Or the sound of a man who has popped in for a visit to his elderly mum and found that shes fallen down the stairs and had to lie there for hours cold and alone and scared. These are extreme examples, but they happen every single day on every single shift for a lot of people. Welcome to the world of emergency healthcare, every single person I speak to is having at the very least a very bad day and possibly the worst day of their lives.
These are not things that happen on a daily basis in the chemical engineering industry or at airport security. You do not rely on chemical engineers and baggage scanners to save the day on the worst day of your life. They do an important job but the stakes and the pressure are incomparable. Airport security might prevent a terrorist attack sure, but they don't go in to working knowing that a situation of that magnitude is going to happen on a daily, weekly, monthly basis - they know it will happen at most once in their careers. Paramedics do, Doctors do, Call Handlers do. That is why they are treated differently.
The NHS is failing in many regards, I fully accept that. This is because the NHS suffers from chronic problems:
1. The NHS suffers from a complete lack of funding. Yes the NHS has a massive budget and yes it has a lot of staff but in comparison to the budget it would have if we were all paying for private health care it is miniscule. We pay a small fee for a good service, if you want to pay a large fee for a superb service you are more than able to. If I buy a Dacia Sandero I don't expect it to act like an Aston Martin, I just accept that in 90% of situations it is going to do everything I need a car to do and in the extreme examples I'll take the hit. I was made redundant with a significant number of my colleagues because my trust didn't get a 2% rise to keep up with inflation, that's how fine the margins are.
2. The NHS is ultimately run by people who are making decisions based on short political careers. Perhaps they are Health Secretary for a parliament or two or perhaps they are for 5 minutes before a reshuffle. Every one of them wants to make a big difference, a big win so they can continue climbing the ladder and the overwhelming majority of them have little to no experience in healthcare. No other major global businesses make decisions on such a short term basis (football clubs tend to and most of them yoyo around uncontrollably, just look at City before we got a stable long term plan).
This is just my opinion, feel free to disagree and I really don't want to have an argument. The NHS is a fantastic institution doing a fantastic job in shitty circumstances and I will always defend it because I have seen it and its people at its best and worst, and I've seen private healthcare at its best and worst and I know which one I want for my family every time. Maybe I'll die of cancer that could have been prevented, maybe I'll get hit by a car and have to wait too long for an ambulance, but at least I won't bankrupt my family in the process and I won't see the people who need the most help get turned away because they don't have a salary to match.
