Let us now praise those who care

Yesterday evening ceridwen and I were talking about how much we plan, or don’t. Today was an excellent example of my mode: having plans that I ditch when something else comes along. It was my day off, B was going to London and I had a whole list of tasks to get done in some order or another. But shortly after B’s train should have left the station he phoned me, saying he was in an ambulance just round the corner from home.
 
So we spent four or so hours with nine different health professionals, all demonstrating what a wonderful thing the NHS is, from the ambulance paramedics on £11 an hour to the consultants negotiating over which emergency bay their astonishing machinery would be wheeled into next. Kind, skilled, concerned, friendly, professional, every one, as they eliminated the worrying possibilities.

As I stood watching their work, grateful that this comes to us free at the point of need, a bit of last night’s film from Uganda ran through my head, where a mother pulls the canula from her injured child’s arm and forces him to walk, in great pain, away from the hospital because she’s just been asked to pay and can’t.
 
I wonder how much longer we will have the help we had today. The paramedic on £11 an hour told me that private ambulances, on contract to the NHS so that the NHS can meet the 8-minute response target, pay paramedics £25 an hour. So NHS paramedics go to work for the private providers. So NHS response times get worse. So more private contractors are brought in.
 
How sustainable is this? Is it unthinkable that we might have to pay for an emergency ambulance? It was once unthinkable that someone too ill to work would be refused benefits but this evening, full circle, I was back in the cinema watching I, Daniel Blake, a heartbreaking film where Daniel gets care from the NHS (my second echocardiogram of the day) but is broken by our increasingly mean and vicious benefits system.  
 
Apparently our Decision-Makers have called I, Daniel Blake a fiction. From what I saw when working with homeless people, and afterwards when I was unemployed for a while, it's devastatingly truthful. Very highly recommended - mainly so we're fired up about what we need to defend.


Thanks to Ingeborg for hosting Abstract Thursday. This is the sun still shining on an NHS hospital. Long may it do so.