Nurses for Reform, patients for decent healthcare
We had dinner last night with Tim and Helen Evans; Tim and Antoine have been friends since university, and I have been helping Helen - who is a senior nurse and 20 year NHS veteran - with a project for her group, Nurses for Reform.
NFR believes it is no longer acceptable for nurses to sign up to careers in public sector healthcare only to find they are unable to access the resources and autonomy they need to do their work. It rejects bland egalitarianism in favour of contestability. And it believes in people - not politics.
We got on the subject of my recent unsatisfactory experiences with the NHS (the latest being today, when my doctor - who I actually quite like - studied my blood work and x-ray results and said to me, “I’m sorry, you are a very healthy woman. I have no idea why all these conditions are afflicting you.” But that’s more of an “Oh crap, what do I do now?” frustration, not necessarily annoyance with the broken NHS.). Tim and Helen were pretty aghast that I’ve let my private health insurance lapse since leaving my full-time head of marketing role in April. They signed their baby daughter, Petica (who is too cute and agreeable for words), up to BUPA when she was five days old. (I believe they pay £5 per week for her coverage.) Most people don’t realise that that’s one of the smartest bargains you can make - when the kid’s been signed up from birth, there’s no worrying about future exclusions for pre-existing conditions. So, note to self.
Helen also pointed out that healthcare is the only industry where the people working in it are expected to be on top of their game, delivering the best possible results and service, 100 per cent of the time. Obviously, that’s not always going to be possible. So there will always be a certain amount of kvetching about how such-and-such happened so OF COURSE the system it happened under must totally suck. The NHS doesn’t totally suck, because there are a great number of dedicated professionals like Helen who work in it. But the system is inherently rotten, and the politics get in the way of the job of making people well, and I’m glad to see Helen activating her fellow nurses to campaign for a better NHS. (More soon on how I’ve been helping out, but if you’re a qualified nurse in Europe, you can sign up as a supporter here.)
Filed under: Life
>Helen also pointed out that healthcare is the only industry where the people working in it are expected to be on top of their game, delivering the best possible results and service, 100 per cent of the time.
Medicine’s v.high in the “don’t screw up” expectation stakes, but I wouldn’t agree they’re unique in that regard. The nuclear industry and brokerage clearing houses are two of my customer-types with serious auras of “do not mess this up”, and in honesty I feel we should expect and demand more of everything in the service sector, to put them on their mettle.
But in mitigation of my nitpicking, I still like the NHS more than you do. :-)