Our NHS is 75 years old today. I was taken aback to work out this morning (coincidentally, on my way to hospital for a check-up that was booked months ago when I had no idea of today's significance) that I have existed for more than 90% of its life. Because it's been there for the whole of my life it's easy to think that it has always existed.

But when I got my childhood vaccinations it was only 7 years old. It prevented my generation from getting smallpox and polio. When it was 20 it gave me glasses so I could see the blackboard.

The NHS was only 31 when I took off across the Atlantic and spent four weeks travelling around the USA on Greyhound buses talking to whoever I happened to be sitting next to. I was so naive: I heard lots of stories and I could not believe how many people had suffered without health care. The most shocking were the women who had given birth on their own because they did not have insurance cover and could not afford a midwife.

The only insurance I had to pay was the tax deducted from my salary. It didn't matter eight years later when I started to lose sight in one eye that I wasn't working so wasn't paying tax. The NHS saved my sight anyway. I still wasn't paying tax two years after that when it saved my daughter's life.

It's poignant that the funding crisis the NHS now faces is partly a result of its own success. In 1948, when the NHS was founded, with its main focus being on injury and infection, life expectancy (at birth) for men was 65 and for women was 70. 70 years on (before Covid changed the statistics) life expectancy was 14 years longer. 14 years in which to develop heart disease, diabetes or dementia. About 70% of current NHS funding is spent on these conditions.

It's also the result of much lower tax rates than when I started work and a refusal by rich politicians, who can easily pay for their own private treatment when they want it, deciding that the health and lives of people poorer than them do not matter.

As a society we urgently need to decide whether they do.


On a much less serious note, I was seen by a junior doctor this morning. She told me everything was fine but she just wanted to get the consultant to look so he could confirm her conclusion. He came in, had a look, told me that everything was fine then put his arm round my shoulder. I reacted spontaneously to touch that wasn't predatory or creepy and put my arm round his waist. I only realised what I'd done when he stepped back and blushed. Oops. I wasn't remotely fussed but I imagine he won't be putting his arm round patients again for a while, even if they are only old dears who need reassuring.


The photos I took this morning with my new camera/phone which I haven't learnt to use yet are very disappointing. This is the best of a bad lot.