Nhs

Mrs May promises to amend the Equalities Act to prevent employers from ‘unfairly’ dismissing those with mental disorders. It is a laudable aim, but imagine what would happen if businesses had to keep on a disturbed worker. Imagine what it would be like, not only for the employer, but for the other employees. In her speech on ‘the shared society’ in January, Mrs May pitched into the ‘burning injustice of mental health and inadequate treatment’. In doing so, she praised the ‘tremendous campaigning work by Black Mental Health UK’. Again, this was rash. Mental health is an over-politicised subject, and organisations like Black Mental Health UK help make it so.

Are there any words which have such an affinity as ‘NHS’, ‘IT’ and ‘cock-up’? Older readers might remember how the Department of Health blew £10 billion of taxpayers’ money on a computer system which was eventually abandoned. Today comes news that two dozen hospitals have been affected by a massive hack of computer systems. Patients in Stevenage and Blackpool have been told not to visit their local A&E departments unless they are desperate. Operations have been postponed. Phone systems have gone down and doctors are unable to prescribe drugs. The culprit is a piece of ‘ransomware’ which seems to be capable of locking computers which it says will only be unlocked if a payment is made in bitcoin.

There’s a graveyard inside Henry Marsh’s head, though you’d never guess it to look at him. There he sits in his elegant flat in a small castle on a small island in the Oxford Thames: 67, attractive, restless. There he sits with the world all around him: Persian rugs, French tapestries, Japanese prints and his beautiful blonde wife (the anthropologist Kate Fox) in a separate flat below. But the ghosts of past patients are never far away. Henry Marsh is a brain surgeon, celebrated for his skill in operating on patients under just local anaesthetic. He’s famous also for his astonishing memoir Do No Harm, to which he’s now written an equally remarkable sequel, Admissions.

Philip Hammond should be sending George Osborne a case of the finest claret. For Osborne’s decision to accept the editorship of the Evening Standard, has distracted Westminster’s from  this week’s spectacular Budget reversal. But, as I say in The Sun this morning, the fallout from it will be felt for some time. Even Hammond’s Cabinet allies admit that ‘Of course, he’s damaged’ by the whole issue. But those in May’s circle are blunter. Pointing out the mistake was ‘staring you right in the face’ before he made it and that the National Insurance hike on the self-employed ‘was pushed back several times' by Number 10.

In the NHS clinic where I work, adults who suspect they may have Asperger syndrome wait almost a year for a diagnosis. The clinic takes referrals from all over Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (a population of 860,000), but we have to see all of them in the hours of a single full-time doctor. And the clinic is not given funds to run a follow-up support service once someone has been diagnosed. These individuals struggle to socialise, are neurologically different, and are overlooked because their disability is invisible. Many have experienced bullying in childhood, underemployment in adulthood and exploitation because of their social naivety. Many are made to feel inferior despite their often considerable talents. No surprise that many develop depression.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the debate on the increase in National Insurance Contributions for the self-employed is that it lays bare the lie that people are happier to pay more tax to fund the NHS. In December, the Guardian reported a study that suggested that 70 per cent of people would 'happily pay an extra 1p in every pound if that money was guaranteed to go to the NHS', while almost half of the 1,000 people surveyed said that they would even pay an extra 2p in the £. Where are these people now?

If you’ve had enough of battling to get the kids a doctor’s appointment, or don’t want them waiting months to be seen by a specialist, there is an alternative. You could take out children’s private medical insurance that will pay for some or all of the diagnosis and treatment your child may require. Such policies come with a long list of benefits. For example, most offer same-day video and phone consultations and can arrange specialist appointments and procedures much faster more than through the NHS. 'Another valued benefit,' says Kevin Pratt, consumer affairs editor at MoneySupermarket.com, 'is the cash payment that is made to the parent for each night that a child has to stay in hospital.

We all think pretty highly of ourselves these days, free from old-fashioned ideas about sin. We’re good people. And yet… I read in a letter in a local newspaper recently a description of an event in the writer’s own home which shows that we might also be becoming monsters. The letter-writer, Jane, was a lady in her late fifties who cared at home for a husband, Fred, with terminal brain cancer. As Jane’s letter explained, Fred had fallen recently on to the bathroom floor, and as she was unable to lift him, she telephoned for help. Seven medics arrived and rushed to the scene. All seven then stalled. Though Fred was not obese, though there were seven of them, they told Jane that they were not allowed to help him up.

We all think pretty highly of ourselves these days, free from old-fashioned ideas about sin. We’re good people. And yet… I read in a letter in a local newspaper recently a description of an event in the writer’s own home which shows that we might also be becoming monsters. The letter-writer, Jane, was a lady in her late fifties who cared at home for a husband, Fred, with terminal brain cancer. As Jane’s letter explained, Fred had fallen recently on to the bathroom floor, and as she was unable to lift him, she telephoned for help. Seven medics arrived and rushed to the scene. All seven then stalled. Though Fred was not obese, though there were seven of them, they told Jane that they were not allowed to help him up.

This morning, we wake up to the news that the government is now serious about collecting money from health tourists – those who come to the UK to use the NHS without being entitled to it. We have, alas, heard this before. For weeks now, we have been reading about a crisis in A&E — a symptom, we’re told, of a funding crisis in the National Health Service more generally. Since I started working for the NHS almost 45 years ago, this has been a familiar theme: the system is creaking, but a bit more tax money should suffice. To many of us who have seen the system close at hand, another question presents itself: what if the NHS were to cut down on waste? And perhaps recover costs from the health tourists who turn up for treatment to which they are not entitled?

An old acquaintance died recently. A friend of mine, who was closer to him than I was, rang to tell me. She’d known him for 40 years and looked after him at various times when he fell ill. He was diagnosed with cancer three weeks ago and died suddenly in hospital last week. She tried to find out what happened, but as she is not next of kin (he had no relations) she will probably never know. Within the monolith of the NHS, patients, particularly the elderly, are able to disappear from view as effectively as prisoners in the Soviet gulag. If they don’t re-emerge alive, no except a close relation can discover why. I first realised this two years ago when I moved from London to Oxford, and tried to carry on volunteering as a hospital visitor. A neighbour broke her leg.