During the pandemic, after a few months I erased the word "unprecedented" from my vocabulary, but it is back again, with a vengeance. Not the pandemic, although COVID-19 hasn't gone away by any means... But that word, as the NHS, or the HSC as it strictly is in NI, is under unprecedented pressure. Every winter produces a blip... I saw that clearly in my 14 years as a critical hospital chaplain up to 2018, but there is no doubt that underfunding since 2010 with the "austerity" policy of the Westminster government, poor human resource planning in terms of training, recruitment and retention of staff (which also requires funding), and the repeated refusal of our local assembly to implement review after review because of a short-sighted and parochial approach to strategic planning, together with the after-effects of the pandemic, have eviscerated the ability of our dedicated health professionals to deal with the tsunami of needs they are facing.
I could rant at length on a variety of related issues here, but I am actually, and sadly moved to blogging this at all because of how it is impacting on me... And if we are honest, that is ultimately what moves most of us to speak or act. We generally take things (and people) for granted until we are inconvenienced. Long before the pandemic, during the previous NI assembly sabbatical, my mild mannered wife repeatedly asked, why are people not out on the streets protesting if not rioting? To which I said, it will take deaths at the door of a hospital or the bankruptcy of a major grammar school before people realise just how bad things are.
Most of us only significantly need the health service as we get older, but as a lot more of us are surviving to older and older ages that is part of the problem. For those of us who are younger, even where we have health needs they are managed so effectively that we don't need critical care. But as the financial pressures hit critical care, some of those other health management programmes will increasingly be impacted, which will undoubtedly ultimately increase those needing critical care, but that will be further down the line and, at the moment, all short-term savings are important. And clearly that is true of a programme I have been on to help manage my diabetes. This morning I was notified that this programme, which was initially funded for a short term trial in one health trust, is no longer going to be funded. Despite the fact that it works, and indeed has worked exceedingly well for me in a way that previous regimes did not. Now, I am not using this blog as a basis for lobbying for future funding... I am not privy to the cost of it to the public purse. I am only privy to the potential cost to my own physical and mental health... because both are linked... I am not someone who worries about my health on the whole... I should probably pay more attention to it, and not doing so probably contributed to my diabetes in the first place. But I am not someone who naturally has a well-balanced approach to life... I tend to be all or nothing... Be it in terms of money, health or many other aspects of life.
And this came home to me this week when watching a TV series that I have been binging over the holidays... It reached a point where it was supposedly dealing with the early months of the pandemic, when health providers were heroes in inadequate PPE being clapped, rather than shirking strikers being vilified by government ministers on talkshows... And I found myself feeling the same stress that I felt in the early days of the pandemic, when we were left without clear guidance; washing our shopping or leaving it untouched for 2 days; isolating, untested, if we had been near anyone with symptoms. But part of my problem at that point was not the information I did not have, but the information I did have which suggested that some of the same pathways that delivered lifesaving drugs to me, were the same pathways that this novel coronavirus used to enter human cells, making diabetics particularly susceptible. I had previously joked my way through the 2019 post-brexit "Yellowhammer" report on drugs that might be difficult to obtain, with my eldest son sending me a message on reading it saying "It was nice knowing you!" But in the early days of the pandemic I found my sense of humour had deserted me. This was a personal existential threat.
And I suppose in the wake of that triggering viewing earlier in the week, and other pressures I am currently under, I am probably less able to rationally process the letter I received this morning. I am under no immediate risk, there will be other treatment regimes, and the nurses and clinicians responsible for my care will continue their dedicated work on my behalf and on behalf of others in their clinic (when they aren't on strike). But I am stressed out by it. I could feel my chest tighten and my jaw clench. I was on the verge of tears.
So how must others with much more critical health needs... and those caring for them... AND THEY DO CARE... How must they be feeling?
Rishi Sunak is apparently going to convene a task force to address these issues in England and Wales. Who is going to do anything about the debacle here?
Selah
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