Do you remember those evenings in 2020 when millions of us stood outside our homes and applauded the NHS?

And only a few months later it looked as if the pandemic would more or less be burnt out by the scorching summer. We have had many more deaths and infections caused by the pestilent virus since then and it is still with us today.

But the more significant trend is for many people to stop looking at the NHS with rose-tinted glasses.

After the Second World War, the National Health Service seemed the right medicine to give a sick and weary country. People were rightly proud of the fact that medical care could be provided everywhere at no cost to the patient.

But there were political rows right from the start when the Labour government hailed the NHS as its achievement while the Tories pointed out that Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition administration had set the welfare wheels in motion. Doctors made sure they kept their lucrative private practices alive even in an era of state medicine.

And how free was free? Charges for prescriptions were introduced causing the resignation of two ministers. This was accepted by most patients even though the charges now are the best part of £10 per item. Dentistry, once free, is truly expensive on the NHS and hard to find but even dearer in the private sector.

Politicians made out that the public was outraged by these charges but patients thought the NHS was doing all right even though it had abandoned some of its basic principles.

What bothered people far more was the continued imposition of food rationing a decade or more after the war had ended. It seemed mean and unnecessary.

Already by the early to mid-Fifties when Labour had been supplanted by the Tories in government, it became clear that a system set up to deal with rickets and scarlet fever was doing much more besides and was creaking under the strain.

The NHS had become a bottomless pit. Successive governments put money into it which was swallowed with a bureaucrat burp but the problems only became worse. It was the biggest bureaucracy outside the Soviet Army and considerably less efficient. Yet the public’s faith in it remained undiminished. No one seemed to notice that other countries were catching up quickly with the NHS and in many cases were doing much better. The amount of money going to the NHS was also having a bad effect on other public services, notably education.

There were and are aspects of the NHS deserving the highest praise. The most recent example was during the pandemic when staff worked their socks off to save lives.

And it wasn’t just the nurses and doctors getting most of the media attention who were doing a fantastic job but all those unseen workers who were also being heroic.

But it became obvious that the NHS could and should overall be doing a much better job.

Far too many patients were having to wait months and sometimes years for routine medical procedures which could have been offered speedily in places where the pandemic was weak.

The computer system in the NHS has been a bad joke for many years and has still not been put right. I can almost hear it creaking when medics ask to see my notes and they do not appear.

There are shiny new buildings like the Royal Sussex County Hospital going up in Brighton which look promising from the outside but which will soon have to show their true value. And the development is not before time. Until recently the RSCH had the oldest working ward in the country and there was also no new hospital built in Brighton during the whole of the 20th century.

Some hospital waiting areas are grim beyond belief. Why should patients have to wait in portable waiting rooms for treatment? Why do these buildings so often have broken doors and forbidding notices? Go into the private sector and you will usually find sparkling buildings and a welcoming atmosphere far removed from much of the NHS. Waiting times are measured in days rather than years.

There are hospitals run by the NHS such as the Chelsea and Westminster in London which are attractively designed but too many which look dire.

The NHS must not be regarded any longer as a sacred cow which cannot be slaughtered or even altered for the better. The basic principle of free health care must stay and be provided by the state but funding for minor procedures must change so that most people pay through an insurance system similar to those in other countries. The state would continue to pay for those in poverty.

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