In the years leading up to November 2005, I began to suffer from increasingly chronic back pain. Following numerous MRI scans, with all the waiting time involved, at the Chelsea & Westminster and Charing Cross Hospitals, I underwent three surgical operations on my back at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore.
More recently, in 2009, I attended a three-week Pain Management Programme at The Wolfson Neuro-Rehabilitation Centre in Wimbledon.
These experiences have severely affected my career but, more positively, they have opened my eyes to the suffering of people around me – and my desire to help them.
Although I like to think that I have always contributed to the society around me throughout my life, I admit that the sheer level of pain, and the length of time I have suffered this pain, has directly led me to offer myself to stand as your MP in Battersea.
If it were not for this, it is unlikely that my professional career would have enabled me to make this move.
I am not a ‘career politician’.
In 2003, I was asked by the Department of Health to find a way to persuade people to use and, in particular, access the NHS more efficiently.
The NHS felt that if I could help them persuade patients to go to appropriate ‘Primary Care’ outlets before seeing their GP, then this would lessen the burden on GP surgeries and cut down waiting times – which was the major complaint about NHS services.
My simple insight was that all the communications material about the NHS was distributed within GP surgeries (and hospitals for that matter). When you enter your GP surgery, you are inundated with publicity material for all manner of medical conditions and social issues.
Yet, when you walk out of the surgery into the big wide world, the NHS is largely invisible.
So I took a walk from Tooting Bec station to St George’s Hospital. There were no less than thirteen NHS outlets, not one of which had any NHS branding whatsoever.
For example, if you went to see your NHS-trained doctor, there would be no NHS branding outside the surgery, if he gave you a prescription (on an unbranded green form), you would take it to the chemist (no NHS branding), you would walk to the Pharmacy section at the back of the store (no NHS branding) and receive your medicine, often for free, from the NHS-trained pharmacist and walk out of the store with your medicine in a paper bag with a green cross on it (no NHS branding) – plus various other items you had bought from the same shop at the same time.
So, my recommendation was that the NHS should approach all of these outlets and insist that these stores place an NHS sign outside with the promise that this would mean that inside the store would be the leaflet advising you of how and where to access your local Primary Care outlets.
Following presentations to the Department of Health, I was asked to present my recommendations to the Prime Minister’s Office of Public Service Reform. Soon after, the Department of Health announced that my ideas were to be adopted nationally.
In my life, especially recently, I have depended more than most on the NHS. From my own personal and professional experience, I treasure this unique privilege. With a few newsworthy exceptions, I am convinced that the standard and quality of medical treatment provided by the NHS is a match for anywhere in the world.
What lets the NHS down is management (in which I include cleaning).
I believe it is absolutely within the ‘Role of Government’ to fund and support the NHS, but I myself have heard NHS staff say ‘the Government wants every child to have an MMR injection’ and even ‘the Government is investing in pain’ (yes, it’s true). But I don’t want ‘the Government’ anywhere near my body. Don’t you touch me with that needle, Gordon!
All the major political parties claim the NHS will be better under their management, but I don’t want any Government – especially these career politicians who, as John Major said, have never touched real life, to manage the NHS at all.
I appreciate this is a hugely complex issue, and that it is difficult to provide high services on a local level within a national service. I just don’t think the people charged with addressing the issue (i.e. politicians and civil servants) are the right people to do it.
As demonstrated by the Primary Care issue above, I know I could help sort this out.
