My grandfather, who is nearly 100, is in hospital with a life threatening condition. All the family are worried. He is from the Rhondda. We thought putting on some music about the Rhondda would help, but it starting bringing us to tears. When I try to rationalise it, I think how lucky my grand-dad is that we have the NHS. He is a pensioner who doesn’t even own his own home. He was a miner, so is lucky to have not died from a different condition earlier. He has limited wealth, and all his children, including my dad are also pensioners, so they would never be able to afford to pay for him to be treated – without the NHS he would be dead now.
The Conservatives voted against the NHS, Cameron said it was his top priority. I hope he’s genuine, and won’t introduce a privitisation programme.
I don’t think any private sector firm should be allowed to run a public service organization on a monopoly basis. But here is what might seem like a contradiction – I don’t think the government or State should have a monopoly on healthcare either. Let me tell you why I feel the way I feel, it makes me sad and angry thinking about it.
Both of my grandmothers died in State-run hospitals that I don’t feel operated to the highest ethical standards. My paternal grandmother died from lack of fluids, and a hospital bug, and my paternal one because she wasn’t given enough information to give informed consent. Both appeared sedated when I would visit them during the day . They were provided with no disciplined routine to keep them mentally stable.
My grandmothers’ vulnerability – and their inability to make decisions about their own care – was no justification for withdrawing treatment from them – Labour introduced the Mental Capacity Act to try and protect them from this neglect. I feel like crying when I think about it.
When you leave your mother or grandmother in hospital, you trust that the doctors and nurses will look after them. The next thing you hear is that she is dead. You may be shocked, you may be sad, but in the case of both my grandmothers I was angry.
The NHS as a state run monopoly is over 50 years old - is it time to change?
I still have not forgiven the staff on the geriatric wards for the way my grandmothers suffered. It was as if they simply didn’t care. They see old people come in alive and go out dead every day, perhaps they have become desensitized to aging and death. As I write this, I’m worrying that my granddad might get a hospital bug or die from lack of fluids. Tony Blair said their needs to be more input from market forces into the NHS. I think he was right, and I’ll tell you why.
There are several hospitals close to where my grandparents lived; Royal Glamorgan, Dewi Sant, Llwynipia, and Prince Charles.Whenever someone in Pontypridd hears that their grandparent is going to Dewi Sant they fear the worst. We hear about all the people who died shortly after going there.
What if there was competition between the hospitals, and you could choose which hospital you wanted the NHS to pay for your grandparent to go to? No-one would want them to be sent to Dewi Sant! The Pontypridd and Llantrsiant Observer and Rhondda Leader both run columns headed “Look who’s been in court”. Imagine if they added a ‘Look who’s died in hospital column’ each time someone died of a problem caused by negligence. Just like most businesses worry that bad publicity could result in them losing clients, hospitals would worry about a drop in the number of patient admissions.
One of my friends on Facebook said she was a satisfied customer of the AA, who arrived promptly and resolved the problem with her car efficiently and effectively. The AA knows that if it provides a bad service, making the customer wait 2.5 hours to be seen (as patients do in A&E) it would lose customers to its competitors, such as the RAC or Green Flag.
I’m not saying there should different providers of state health insurance, as there is in Belgium, for example. But I think we should be able to take our European Health Insurance Card to any hospital in the EU and be treated on the same terms as in the UK.
If this were already in place, my family could have made a choice between taking my maternal grandmother to the Royal Gwent (where she may have lived) instead of the Royal Glamorgan (where she died). In the case of my paternal grandmother it could have meant taking her to Clinique Fond Roy in Uccle in Belgium, instead of Llwynypia.
Aneurin Bevan is an inspiration of what can be done if people are willing to have the courage of their convictions and do what they think is right and fair.. He stood up for what he believed in. To the best of my knowledge, I think he resigned from the government because they didn’t agree with his ideas on nationalisation. I don’t believe in nationalisation or privatisation. I believe that the privately owned and run utilities, and State-owned and run public services, should gradually give up control to the public, who would form co-operatives and take back control of their lives. I wouldn’t resign in his position just because I couldn’t get my way, as my time on the local councils Llantwit Fardre and Pontypridd prove. I would only resign if my party tried to force me to lie or say what I don’t believe in. Even so, so long as there was due process I would vote with my party’s consensus.
If Royal Glamorgan Hospital was a co-operative, my family and I would be shareholders, and we if we were to learn that my grandmother died from neglect, we would be able to get help from the other members of the public to have the management removed if they didn’t dismiss the doctor or nurse whose negligence led to her death.
I think Aneurin Bevan was one of the strongest politicians – providing everyone rich or poor with access to free healthcare. But he wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of giving everyone access to not-for-profit healthcare. Bupa was founded in 1947, a year before the NHS was founded.
My father, who had a very modest education, and came from a mining family in the Rhondda, first trained as a carpenter, and has worked his way up in the construction industry for the last 54 years. He works in the private sector, but most of his work is for the public sector. Some of his great achievements have included making toilets for disabled users in Royal Glamorgan Hospital accessible to people in wheelchairs without them needing the help of a nurse.
His firm was in the private sector, and the government paid it to deliver their promises for better hospitals and greater equality. Earlier in his career, he was made redundant from a firm that had provided a key staff benefit: private health insurance. You may think I’m privileged to have access to private healthcare through my father’s employer, but I know I was lucky. Because we had private health insurance, I was able to be seen by an epilepsy consultant in Bristol, when I lived in Pontypridd. At the time, we heard unproven rumours that lots of people with epilepsy were dying in the Heath Hospital in Cardiff from botched surgery. I don’t know whether it was true, but I was glad I didn’t have to go there.
What would Aneurin Bevan have to say about this? – I don’t think he’d be angry with my dad for having insurance with a not-for-profit healthcare provider instead of using one paid for by the Government. But I do think he would be very angry, fuming, disgusted and appalled that his NHS was so neglectful and limiting the choice and rights to free movement that the people he set it up to help are democratically and constitutionally entitled to.
The company that made my dad redundant terminated our private health insurance cover when I was halfway through a programme of surgery to make my epilepsy more manageable. This surgery was very important to me because in the days before the Disability Discrimination Act was extended to cover education the university I was attending refused to put their lecture notes onto the internet for me to access at home. If successful, the surgery would me I could work for my degree without having to be in the medical centre or at home all the time. I needed the surgery urgently. If I didn’t have it I could have died from a grand mal attack, and if I didn’t have it privately I would have been placed on a waiting list (and I also feared I there was a risk I could die from botched surgery at one of the aforementioned hospitals).
My father convinced the directors of the company he set up to club together to pay for a group private health insurance scheme for their families, so he could get me the surgery I needed. I had the surgery and I don’t have as many seizures as I used to, but I still can’t learn to drive (as I need to live for a full year without a seizure to qualify for a driving license). Private health insurance has also paid for treatment of my bad back, which the government and the Health Trusts believe is not a priority so I couldn’t have it paid for by the NHS..
Under a private healthcare scheme, consultants charge the private company that is running the scheme around £175 for a first consultation. After the consultation the consultant tells your GP what you need. If you need medication, the GP will prescribe it and the NHS will pay for it. People without private health insurance probably don’t know, that if the doctor consultant provided to you by the NHS is not providing you with what you feel is an acceptable standard of care, you can pay £175 to be seen by a private sector consultant, and you GP will have to follow their instructions, not the State-funded consultants instructions. Furthermore, private sector doctors don’t need to worry about how much your medicines cost, as they don’t pay it, but doctors who are funded through the NHS are made (wrongly, in my opinion) to worry about cost and targets. This is only likely to get worse for patients in England under the Conservatives.
Members of the Labour Party probably share my disgust about the manner in which healthcare is provided in the UK. Why should patients have to pay twice over to receive the standard of healthcare that we require? Aneurin Bevan would be turning in his grave if he knew that both my grandmothers died unnecessarily, that the only reason I’m still alive today is because my dad landed a good job with private healthcare cover, and that it’s only because my dad’s private sector business partners were willing to give up some of their profits that I didn’t die from having a seizure, or because of a botched operation.
I don’t think anyone should have to pay for private healthcare. My dad has now retired, so I’m panicking now about where I am going to find the money to pay for private healthcare so that I can still be treated for my back problems, my epilepsy, my osteoporosis, non-invasive urology treatment, and other conditions that the politicians are stopping or restricting the NHS from paying for.
Aneurin Bevan would surely be ashamed of the current Labour Party, that allows people to die unnecessarily in hospitals that aren’t set-up properly for patients’ needs, because of all the bureaucracy they and the Tories created, resulting in so many unnecessary pen-pushing NHS Trust managers, costing money that could be better spent on patient care.
Now the Tories are saying they want to hand the spending power to over to GPs. Are they serious? Every GP swears an oath saying they will not taking financial considerations into account when recommending treatment to patients.! Giving powers to GPs over spending will mean that every time they treat a patient doctors will be breaking the promise they made when they qualified.
Those of us with private healthcare can ask our GP to refer us to any consultant at any hospital in the UK. I want everyone in the UK to have this right. My aunt lived in Scotland where she died of cancer. I know the hospital did the best it could for her, but I still wonder whether, had she had been married to my dad instead of my uncle, would she still be alive today?
Many people will understand the emotions I’m feeling right now. The anger about my grandmothers’ unnecessary deaths, the worries about my grandfather’s health, and the fear that if I can’t find money to pay for private health insurance that my own conditions may not be treated correctly in the future. Will I be forced to choose only to have those treatments that are available in State-owned hospitals, or only have the treatment that a consultant paid for by the NHS recommends, even if it is not the one that a private doctor would impartially recommend? For example
Patients living in Great Britain and Northern Ireland deserve free healthcare that is tailored to our needs. It’ that simple. We don’t actually care if our doctor works for the private sector or the public sector, so long as they listen to us, understand us, and do what’s right for us (rather than thinking about how much profit they can make, or how many targets they can meet). We don’t deserve to be on waiting lists. We do deserve the best treatment available provided to us when it is needed.
The French and Germans put their differences behind them after the Second World War, to take the first step to creating a European Union, where everyone would be able to move freely between countries, irrespective of their beliefs. The European Union didn’t exist when Aneurin Bevan was alive. If he were alive today, I have a feeling he would agree with what I’m about to propose.
All the Governments of Europe should come together to create the Supranational Health Service (SNHS). With only having a European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) in our possession (which many of us do already) we and everyone else in Europe should be able to ask our doctors to refer us to a consultant anywhere in the EU, based not on cost, but on medical need.
We shouldn’t need medical travel insurance, nor to deal with a stack of paperwork if we have an accident while on holiday. We should just have to show our EHIC and have the cost of our treatment billed to the NHS. We should be treated exactly the same way as if we were receiving treatment in the UK. Mr Lansley, you can stop the English having free prescriptions, because you won’t accept that your economics have been disproved by the Assembly, but we in Wales should be able to enjoy free prescriptions abroad, not just at home.
