The NHS is dead.
To me it died today.
For the sake of anonymity, for the past twenty years I have been privileged to know and love someone who works very closely in the care of children who are terminally ill.
I have watched this person give a significant part of their life, their emotional labour, themselves to the care of people less fortunate than them and to the highest possible standard.
Over the past few years I have watched the service in which they work disintegrate and decline due to lack of funding and just the general lack of care of the people surrounding it. The people now working in the service are expected to give the least possible amount to the most possible amount of patients for the lowest possible quality. Everything is recorded electronically, everything is ticked in a box.
Well you can’t tick care in a box.
The final straw came in an email from a ‘colleague’ who had been asked (they are at work doing this job) to deliver paracetamol to a patient who is terminally ill. The degree of vitriol in the email that was returned, which was not even signed by the individual involved (who is undoubtedly a senior member of staff) was truly awful and one of the worst I have ever seen. Let me repeat – the patient is dying.
This is not a world of fillings and teeth straightening and “oh you might need a plastic denture to replace your second molars”. This is people who are dying, children who are dying.
Please do not think for a minute that NHS dentistry in its current format is in anyway secured because when we start stealing money off these children it should be stolen from orthodontics or anterior crowns or any other thing like this.
I am not political but it was clear to see that when we voted for another Conservative Government on the promise that we might remain a little bit more rich or we refuse to vote for Scottish independence because we were being offered money by the opposition parties to not vote for independence. We made a decision of money over society.
We will, inevitably, continue to make these decisions and that’s fine as long as the whole of the middle class realise that they will have no NHS dentistry, and in fact very little NHS left, that they don’t directly fund themselves. I am cool with that if that’s what they choose. It wouldn’t be my choice but I am clever enough and robust enough to work around the system that other people create, I am just not so sure that everybody is and I think a lot of people are in for a cold, hard shock of disappointment.
The person I know and care about will drive to that patient themselves anytime, even when they’re not at work, with the paracetamol but soon they will leave because the pressure they have to bear is too much and they and their family will snap. Once they leave one of the great unsung heroes of the NHS will be gone. Another one and another one and another one; drip, drip, drip.
And then we all drown.
Blog Post Number: 820
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