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Showing posts with label nhs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nhs. Show all posts
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Thursday, October 25, 2018
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Like the vast majority of people in this country, I have never known anything other than the NHS. It's our safety net : setting bones in casts, diagnosing illness and there for the inevitable problems that come with age. Well, that's the theory. The reality is that this safety net is fraying, the holes in it are growing bigger and if urgent changes aren't made it may collapse completely.
Veteran comedian and activist Mark Thomas is, as the police describe him on their database of domestic extremists, a "general rabble-rouser and alleged comedian". To mark the 70th birthday of the NHS he's giving it a checkup, examining its history, its current state and delivering a prognosis for the future.
The show consists of anecdotes from his time embedded in various London hospitals and medical centres, combined with interviews with prominent healthcare bigwigs and his own observations. Before we get into the meat of the show, it must be pointed out that Thomas isn't just a witty campaigner with a talent for meticulous research, he's also an incredible performer. Check Up is delivered at a relentless rat-a-tat pace that barely stops for breath - the information he delivers feeling as if it's downloaded straight into our brains.
A common thread throughout the show is Thomas explaining what NHS staff deal with on a daily basis. For example, part of his research was spending a night in a central London A&E . This sounds like well-managed chaos, with experienced doctors juggling various patients with critical wounds, before zeroing on one in particular who has fallen through a 1st story plate glass window.
He describes being sat in the corner of the operating theatre, trying to make himself as unobtrusive as possible while legions of expert professionals operate, anaesthetise, transfuse blood - all whirring around the patient in a blizzard of limbs, equipment and barked orders. What he's watching is the result of hundreds of thousands of hours of study, millions of pounds worth of training, the pinnacle of mankind's technological medical prowess. The patient dies.
But there's no time for reflection - the next critical patient is being wheeled through the scuffed doors.
Accurately communicating what NHS staff deal with on a daily basis is impossible, but Thomas does it about as well as anyone reasonably could. Whether it's as high pressure as A&E, regimented as a dialysis centre or just the patience and empathy in a dementia ward, the staff are performing a constant high-wire act: balancing a fierce duty of care to their patients; dealing with cuts to services (there's a particular keenly felt moment where a GP decries the government cutting the toenail clipping service); and, usually a long way behind, their own physical and mental wellbeing.
It's when the heroism of the staff is contrasted with the ideological bent of the government that the show really hots up. While the breadth of what the Conservatives (and their Liberal Democrat stooges) have done to the NHS is difficult to summarise, it's all under the ideological umbrella of free market economics. Socialised healthcare system is anathema to Thatcherite Conservatives, who believe that competition within a marketplace is the only way forward.
As anyone who's used a train lately will testify, they're wrong. While they might sing compelling tunes about Darwinian competition resulting in survival of the fittest, the reality is a race to the bottom as each competitor strives to reduce costs to get a nose ahead of their rivals. And most, tantalisingly to Conservative politicians, opening the NHS up to the market fills their pockets as the private healthcare companies they're associated with (and on whose boards they will inevitably sit) prosper.
Though shrouded in byzantine financial arrangements and many degrees separated from an individual patient's misery, make no mistake: politicians profiting from private healthcare companies are directly enriching themselves via the pain of you and your loved ones.
Thomas pins this on Andrew Lansley's 2012 restructuring of the NHS (described as an attempt to emulate the privatisation of utilities), a decision which is estimated to cost the NHS £2 billion per year. His reforms in the Cameron government have resulted in, among many other things, fewer nurses, the ruination of mental health care and contributed to Britain having some absolutely dismal cancer survival rates (which, uh, he now belatedly realises).
New Labour is far from blameless too, with the Blair and Brown government's PFI schemes set to funnel money from the NHS into the pockets of private companies for generations to come.
Thomas' prognosis is bleak. An interviewee explains that we have been having our cake and eating it for decades, enjoying relatively low taxes while expecting the very best in healthcare. It's a situation that cannot continue and future governments will be placed in the awkward political position of raising taxes or abolishing the NHS in all but name (even the most reptilian Tory recognises the worth of the NHS brand). If you can picture any future Conservative government drastically raising taxes to support a non-profit seeking public service you have a better imagination than I do.
It's a worrying future (especially with Brexit looming) and you just have to cast an eye over the Atlantic where a cancer diagnosis can bankrupt a family or a broken leg can cripple you financially and literally. The takeaway from the Check Up is that the NHS isn't just something to rely on - it's something you have to fight for. And everytime someone votes Tory it's just another hairline crack in its edifice.
Appreciate what you've got, because you'll miss it when it's gone.
Mark Thomas: Check Up is at the Arcola Theatre until 3rd November. Tickets here.
Monday, September 19, 2016
Monday, September 19, 2016
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You feel a weird combination of reassurance and worry walking through the doors of an NHS clinic. The staff are busy yet friendly, the walls are festooned with upbeat primary coloured posters and there's a pleasantly paternalistic atmosphere. This is a place designed to make you well, doing its level best to send you out the door in better shape than you walked in.
But then you notice the damp on the walls, the peeling paint and furniture that hasn't been replaced in 20 years. The NHS is suffering the death of a thousand cuts: the victim of a government ideologically opposed to a free at the point of use publicly owned health service. Jeremy Hunt assures us that they're merely 'modernising' the NHS when anyone with a glimmer of sense can see that he's setting it up to fail, its carcass fodder for the circling corporate vultures of the American healthcare industry. I mean, if it's not making investors any money, what's the point of it?
So it's wonderful to see an exhibition like The Art of Caring - a collection of work from nurses, patients and artists depicting their ideas on the theme of caring, specifically nursing. The exhibition is collaboration between Kingston University, The Arts Project and Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust, featuring work that ranges from photography, painting, performance and sculpture. Some of it is professional and polished, some is rough and passionate, but all displays a tenderness and empathy that perfectly suits the surroundings.
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| (Fractured Memories) Doll Therapy by Aran Illingworth |
There's a lot to take in here, but I particularly enjoyed the following. (Fractured Memories) Doll Therapy by Aran Illingworth. It's a quietly devastating canvas piece about Alzheimers, capturing a painful morsel of misery in the eyes of someone whose memory is gradually eroding away. The arts n crafts textile look adds to the emotional wallop, not only looking like something a kindly grandmother might make, but the rough shapes and soft fabric underlining the subjects humanity and increasingly blurry edges.
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| Comfort and Joy - Susie Mendelsson |
On a slightly different wavelength is Susie Mendelsson's Comfort and Joy, a bizarre mixed-media sculpture of a creepily wizened homunculus approaching a baby from behind while a tiny man stares on in horror. It's disturbing stuff, the soft manufactured plastic of the doll contrasting with the hand-carved chaos of the monster. That title has got to be a joke, because there's precious little comfort or joy in this. If I had to pick out a meaning, it seems to speak of a mother's trauma at losing a baby, then feeling guilt that the next one survives. Even as she cares for her healthy baby, she cannot help but imagine the forgotten one, balefully staring on in jealousy.
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| One Day at a Time - Susie Mendelsson |
Also by Mendelsson is One Day at a Time, depicting a worried looking person weighed down by faceless little men. This is a little easier to parse, but no less effective. Here the effect of the paranoias, traumas and miseries of the past is literalised, showing them crawling all over an apparently normal person going about their day to day life. It looks suitably nightmarish, the haunted expression of the central figure conveying a palpable desperation.
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| Charlotte CHW |
Sunday's event was capped off by a live performance from Charlotte CHW, who was also exhibiting photographs. Dressed in a suit that perfectly matched the brickwork of the building, she writhed about against the walls and on the floor accompanied by a soundtrack of breaking glass. Watching this it's difficult not to look up at the gently spooky Victorian brickwork and wonder just how long this hospital is going to last. Generations of Londoners have walked through these halls, each with their own individual ailments and stories to tell.
The performance understands this history, treating the building like a psychological sponge that's sucked up a century of trauma and needs to be squeezed dry. Charlotte's movements are slow, painful and precise - it's like you can see dust crumbling from her joints as she repeatedly collapses and rises, trapped in some infinite loop of pain, healing and more pain. I dug it.
Anyhow, The Art of Caring is well worth checking out, demonstrating not only the public's affection for the NHS and its nurses, but just how critical its long-term support systems are. Whether you've sprained your ankle, suffered trauma in Blair's oil wars or are watching an elderly relative succumb to dementia, the NHS will always be there. But it also needs us to fight for it.
Art is Caring is at The Conference Centre, St Pancras Hospital, 4 St Pancras Way, London NW1 OPE (9am-5pm) until 13 October 2016.
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