We've reached a devastating tipping point...

Something extremely concerning has been creeping up on us for a while, and it seems to have reached a tipping point. It hasn’t caught the attention of the nation’s newspaper editors, and yet it’s important - a devastating inflection point within our nation’s slippery slide towards privatised healthcare…

To fully explain the impact of what’s been revealed, it’s necessary to look backwards though - and so I was hoping to turn the clock back briefly...

I arrived at UCL medical school in London in 2004; a bright, swotty kid looking for escape and security. Becoming a doctor felt like the surest way to achieve both of those things. Many people might have asked what I was escaping from, because I’d had a very sheltered upbringing in many ways, attending a fee-paying school in the Channel Islands.

I didn’t come from a wealthy family, but I was surrounded by immense wealth and privilege; the sort of comfort you read about in magazine articles or fanciful novels. Big houses behind security gates, orchards, yachts. What was normal in Jersey wasn’t normal, and yet it was clear to us as youngsters that it was ours for the taking.

Banks and hedge funds recruited young, not especially intelligent people into graduate schemes, even if they’d achieved low grades and unimpressive degrees. It wasn’t hard- we all knew someone’s Dad, or family friend, or an office where we’d done work experience. For some reason, I was repulsed by the idea.

I’d grown up in an environment where people like me (the 40 year old me) were called “do-gooders” in sneering tones. I’d grown up in an environment where I was told that only “poor people” voted for left wing political parties. I certainly didn’t identify myself as left-wing; I didn’t identify myself as anything at all really. A free-floating bundle of nerves looking for an out.

But something felt off, and I had one thing going for me: the ability to work immensely hard, grit my teeth, get my head down and do well academically. If I’m honest, it’s the only thing that seemed to make sense, and it was rewarded. Rewarded by a hard-won place at a competitive medical school in London.

Medical school was where I first met people who had deep-seated beliefs in the power of the NHS. People who had been driven to become doctors because of their belief in a fair society, or their awe at the way that the NHS could attract enormous research and academic talent and at the very same time provide an excellent, free public service.

I met lots of people who cared deeply about international healthcare; who planned long sabbaticals and PhDs studying inequality. I remember meeting some exchange medical students from Cuba, who came to speak to us about their healthcare system, and all of its positives and negatives. I met lots of young people who were very thoughtful about the world around them, but I wasn’t really one of them. In fact, I was pretty ignorant.

I wasn’t becoming a doctor because of an ethical stance. I may have cared deeply about peoples’ wellbeing, but mostly I was a scared young person looking for validation and financial security. That’s why I became a doctor.

I think that’s why I was finally hit so hard by the NHS’s power, when I’d been working within the service for a few years. I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about the service really. And it took me a while to learn enough as a doctor to build my confidence and feel properly useful too. There’s a lot to learn, and I felt pretty useless for a long time, and beat myself up about that a lot. But when I finally felt like I was contributing to the service properly, it felt like a cloud had lifted.

The care we delivered each day felt like magic. Our jobs were always tough and challenging. Our bleeps would go off endlessly, and we’d rarely get to the end of our jobs list. There was never quite enough of anything to go around, and often at the end of the day we’d wonder if we’d missed anything or could have done a better job. But we were able to provide an excellent service; caring for the person who needed the help most, and never considering anyone’s ability to pay.

It is hard to explain to people now the power of going into a workplace like the NHS and caring for the the sick and vulnerable of every part of society back then, when the Tories were only just starting to instigate their austerity cuts in the mid 2010s.

I cannot tell you the feeling it conferred, when I opened the newspapers and read their hollow words about efficiency savings, and then turn up for my night shifts to care for people living on the fringes of society, who we were helping to stay functional because of our phone calls, and assessments, and our care.

I apologise to anyone who doesn’t like to read swear words, but doing our work felt like a massive “fuck you” to everything those politicians were doing.

There’s one patient I think of often, and probably more often than ever at the moment…