The National Health Service - some uncomfortable truths

What's the point of having your own personal space in the blogosphere if you can't use it for the occasional rant?

For a while, I've been meaning to do a post expressing my frustrations (and no doubt those of all strokies and disabled people in general) with the National Health Service. What's spurred me into action is the start of the 2015 General Election campaign.

For the next few weeks, the media will be full of politicians of all parties claiming that they and only they will save/improve the NHS; excuse my language, but it's all b******s. Here's one example - last week, the Prime Minister was all over the papers shouting about how consultants and hospitals needed to work a seven-day week.

That's undoubtedly true, in my opinion. When I was in hospital after my stroke, I knew that if the consultant didn't discharge you on a Thursday morning, you were going to be in hospital for at least another week because you wouldn't see him again until the following week.

And nursing services over the weekend, especially on Sundays, were almost entirely in the hands of students and agency staff. I thought I could live with that until the night a careless agency nurse almost gave me the wrong tablets...

So it needs to happen; but the sad truth is that it won't because, whichever party is in power, there is no money for it. I was reading the other day about the £30billion gap between NHS funding and costs which is likely to exist by 2020 - if nothing changes.

In the meantime, patients like us continue to suffer. The left hand of the NHS continues to fail to know what the right hand is doing and patients like the stroke survivor I know whose speech was severely affected and who still struggles to walk 18 months on cannot get decent speech therapy or physiotherapy services.

The excuses are normally down to a lack of resources/staff or the system not being able to cope with demand; the latter may be true - I had to chase for weeks after my referral from one hospital to another went missing in a blizzard of paper (shouldn't it be computerised?) - but the reality is that nothing will change unless vast amounts of money are pumped into the system even to cope with existing commitments. 

I don't claim to have an answer - but I do know that all the politicians who will pontificate on the subject for the next month probably don't either. And anyone, whoever they are, who claims that their party can provide all the answers is being economical with the truth.