Love Your NHS

I am not afraid of hospitals. In fact, they are almost a second home. The NHS has saved my life twice, mended me in various small ways since then, and also seen my three boys safely into the world. I worked for the NHS for eight years, in various administrative and minor healthcare roles. My degree's mainly focused on healthcare delivery. The NHS has been my lifeline, employer, coworker, chief educator, and friend.
I get exasperated by the NHS. Sometimes, I get thoroughly pissed off with it. But mainly, I adore it and think it's the greatest thing our country does.

My eldest boy, Jim, had his second ever surgery yesterday; a reasonably routine hernia repair. The hospital were completely amazing. Once admitted, the play therapist was on hand to run through the preop procedures with him, and then went off to find him colouring to do to distract him from his raging hunger and anxiety. His nurse then found him a portable TV to watch The Lego Movie on as his surgery was delayed for several hours, and a starving autistic kid does not a happy patient make. We were left alone to watch it, and as it finished, the orderly came to warn us it was almost time. The same orderly made going to the theatres fun, and held an ipad with Angry Birds up to Jim's face while he was cannulated and put under, so he would keep still. He then explained where to go, how long it would be, and gave me a pager to summon me at the end. The recovery nurses explained why he was in so much distress, answered my slightly-too-clinical-for-a-parent questions, and calmly gave him extra pain relief. One of the students made him four rounds of toast, which he declared the greatest thing he'd ever eaten. The handover to the main ward was smooth, and everyone was happy to wait long enough for Tom to come back with some food for me, and to let him stay with us until we were all ready for sleep. They turned a blind eye to me keeping Alex on the ward with us on account of breastfeeding. A HCA took Jim's cannula out this morning and he didn't even wince. Everyone asked us constantly if we were ok, if we needed anything, if everything was OK. And it was immensely, enormously reassuring in the circumstances.
And that's 'just' the nursing and support staff. The surgeon, anaesthetist and various registrars and house officers we saw were equally amazing. They took the time to ask if we had questions, to listen to those questions, and answer them. They had god-knows-how-many patients to cover, but they didn't seem rushed.
Doing anything out of the ordinary with Jimmy can be difficult and stressful, but this was astonishingly easy. Exhausting, and emotional for me, but not harder than it needed to be, mainly because the staff were so wonderful. The day was fairly standard, a child admission, a routine procedure, their daily bread, nothing unusual or exciting here. They could have been blasé about it. They could have been dismissive of our fears. They weren't, not once. We felt safe. We felt reassured. We felt OK about something parents generally find very difficult to be OK about.

I support the junior doctors strike absolutely. I would support a strike if every single clinician in the NHS was involved, because the NHS is the greatest thing we have, and the government seems absolutely intent on destroying it, through a carefully considered strategy of underfunding care and undermining clinicians.
Fight it. Support your healthcare network. Love your NHS.

Image via telegraph.co.uk