A life in the NHS

I arrived in this world seven years after the birth of the National Health Service. My life has been framed by it. I was born in a cottage hospital and regularly weighed by the nurse at the district clinic. As I grew I was taken to the General Practitioner who for many years had a surgery attached to the side of his home. I don’t remember much about those visits other than on one occasion my mother took me along expecting the GP to advise her (and me) what should be a reasonable bedtime. I know she was disappointed by his response.
‘She’ll sleep when she’s tired.’
An American psychiatrist I met many years later suggested I may have had ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder.’ I remember retorting, ‘No I’ve just always been difficult.’ My mother certainly seemed to think so anyway.
When I left school, I studied medicine, and qualified as a doctor and then as a psychiatrist, working in the NHS in Scotland and the North of England for over 30 years. I was, and still am, proud to have been part of the massive social experiment that began the day Aneurin Bevan was symbolically handed a large bunch of keys by the matron of Park Hospital in Davyhulme.

I’ve seen firsthand what life is like in a country where the market governs healthcare. Several years ago I spent a few months studying the American health system as a Harkness Fellow in healthcare policy. A few memories from my time travelling between clinics in Washington State remain with me, indelibly burned into my memory.

• The young woman with poorly controlled asthma stifling her tears because she had to say goodbye to her doctor even though she was not moving away from town. She had changed jobs and her new employers’ insurance system contracted with a different ‘provider’.

• The middle-aged man on the telephone in the waiting room pleading with his friend down the line. ‘Can you lend me some money…I can’t afford to pay for my insulin.’

• The young man in paint splashed overalls who lay flat on the front seat of the bus writhing in agony, getting himself to the Emergency Room by public transport; probably to avoid having to pay for an ambulance he could not afford.

• The general practitioner who told me how she struggled to help a young woman in her clinic who was acutely psychotic. Her basic state medical insurance didn’t cover specialist mental health care, so the visiting psychiatrist, who was in the next office, was unwilling to either see her or advise.

• The nephrologist who specialized in treating African Americans in a southern state with a high prevalence of diabetic renal disease who told me that he could personally ensure his low income patients without health insurance got the care they needed through his academic interest in them, but others would not. He seemed curiously accepting of the status quo. ‘That’s how it is here.’

Don’t get me wrong. The NHS is a complex many-headed beast, fraught with problems. I have not only benefited from it, but I have suffered from it, and seen others do so too. I have struggled with and been bullied by bureaucratic and hostile management and survived an attempt to remove me with some serious consequences for my mental health. I’ve also known visionary managers some of whom became friends. But I’ve also seen the NHS try and fail to entirely abolish traces of the mentality of the huge county asylums it inherited in 1948. I’ve worked with many extraordinarily compassionate and caring practitioners, yet I still hear service users relate examples of attitudes and behaviour towards them, which are all too familiar from my early days as a consultant in a decaying mental hospital.

The gap between physical and mental healthcare, which was wide even when the new district general hospital psychiatric units were attached to the rest of the hospital by long corridors, grew to a chasm with the separation into acute and mental healthcare trusts. Despite evidence that investment in mental health care might have significant impact on the spiraling costs of physical healthcare, the concept of ‘parity’ still seems something to which little more than lip service is paid. Mental health care has been cut by a greater percentage in funding than any other area. And now, with the decline in numbers of GPs and funding of primary care, where 90% of mental health care is provided, we should not be surprised that it is harder than ever for people to get the help they need when they are in acute distress.

Throughout my adult life I’ve been in receipt of mental health care, most of it provided by NHS staff, who went the extra mile even though I wasn’t always easy to help. I’m still and always have been contrary. No one ever suggested it wasn’t in his or her contract to treat me but the goodwill that used to ensure mental health professionals didn’t have to receive treatment in the places where they work has largely disappeared. Rules reminiscent of what I encountered in my times in the USA are becoming increasingly used to determine who gets help.
‘We’re not commissioned to provide care for people with (you name it- Aspergers, Autism, Personality Disorder, Analgaesic abuse….the list grows).’

And now I’m getting older, and I have recently been diagnosed with kidney disease, I know there is a very real possibility I will one day be as dependent (a sorely unfashionable word I know) on the NHS as the day I was born, only this time for dialysis. I’m worried about whether the NHS will exist when I really need it to save my life, or whether I will struggle, as the patients I saw in the USA, to obtain care from an uncaring system.

Last time I visited Park Hospital, now known as Trafford General Hospital, the black and white pictures of the great day the NHS was founded were still on the walls of a corridor in an old part of the building, but clearly forgotten and sorely neglected. Their state seemed to me to represent the ways in which successive governments have tried to forget, suppress or actively derail Bevan’s extraordinary achievement. For all of our sakes let us not sleep walk compliantly into a future when it will suddenly not be there for any of us to depend upon.

In order to do this we must never stop being ‘difficult’. I prefer to call it ‘creatively contrary.’