A week ago I had a heart attack and, like the thousands of others who live within the range of Poole and Bournemouth Hospitals, owe my life to the skill, dedication and team work from the paramedics and staff at both hospitals who are there for us all day and every day of the year. Not forgetting that this dedicated team is drawn from all corners of the earth and is a whole team including all the so called background non-medical workers. Each contributing and enabling the service to function.
I thank them whole heartedly. A word that speaks volumes I feel.
The NHS and I were born at much the same time, just after the war. My family and I have grown up with it. It was political will that founded it and it requires political will to ensure its future.
There are a good number of excellent innovations struggling to get off the ground within the NHS which will improve everyone’s experience, particularly with Urgent and Emergency care. They will take some time to get used to and for some they raise concerns and anxieties which must be addressed.
We hear a good deal about the so called failures within the NHS with its artificial markets, targets, metrics and insufficient funds as if the NHS has generated these for themselves. These are political impositions trying to turn the NHS into something that is worrying. We pay for the NHS via taxation and now we have ‘for profit’ companies being commissioned to provide medical services which invariably end up offshore. It makes no sense unless we are being ‘led’ into a vastly different system which will be unrecognisable from the NHS I know and cherish.
John Daniels
