NHS funding: why it’s time to face the facts of the matter
It’s been tough, but we’ve almost made it. Again. Another bleak midwinter starts to fade; another flu season passes; another dose of agony over NHS funding draws to a close. We may be just an irregular heartbeat away from clinical Armageddon, if all the doomsaying docs are to be believed, but for now the creaking fabric stands firm.
My own winter woes have been light, my dealings with the surgery confined to a routine blood test. Routine, that is, in the generic sense. If you want the specifics, the test was administered by a medical assistant who looked as if she should have been at home revising for her GCSEs – which may explain why the needle felt like something from the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. When politicians talk about weaponising the NHS, this is not at all what they mean.
“People say that they really feel the needle when I pull it out,” smiled the assistant. No kidding.
Anyway, I survived. But the eternal dilemma persists: how to fund the care of more and more people, living longer and longer, demanding more and more treatments, on ever-dwindling resources. Through all the tortuous debates around seven-day weeks, top-down revamps, hypothecated taxes and the rest, the same old circle stubbornly refuses to be squared.
Get used to it. For the real problem is impervious to a political quick fix, however ingenious. It lies within the soil of our expectations.
When Aneurin Bevan strode proudly into Park Hospital, Manchester in July 1948 to launch the shiny new NHS, philosophical materialism was in vogue. True, the study of quantum mechanics had already discredited the Newtonian insistence upon the primacy of matter. Just four years previously Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, had declared:
“There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force...Behind this we must assume the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”
But Planck was a scientist. Between intellectual discovery and popular belief there is always a time lag. Today ‘spirituality’ is back in fashion, the new science feeding and watering the New Age. But in 1948, to the average patient, it was matter that mattered.
Thus the doctor became a stethoscoped angel of light, called upon to pour the balm of science upon all manner of human ills. Chalice and sacristy yielded to the little black bag.
Seven decades later that legacy persists in a different form. We no longer think that matter is all, yet we still turn to students of the body for relief from the maladies of the soul. Our griefs are mapped by symptom, not deepest cause. A syndrome a day keeps the doctor in pay – and drugs firms in the FTSE 100.
Healthcare is precious. Just as there are no atheists in a falling plane, so there are no medical sceptics in casualty. But it’s horses for courses. If we want our doctors to have the time – and the funds – to be doctors, it’s time to stop asking them to be priests.
You can have a look at another one of Richard Nye's columns by clicking here
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