What I dread

I really dread getting seriously ill these days, given the huge crisis in the NHS. People are waiting hours for an ambulance, then maybe more hours outside a hospital waiting to be admitted, and maybe more hours still before getting any effective medical treatment.

If I have a heart attack or a stroke, I'm highly unlikely to get prompt medical attention, because of long waits for medical treatment. By the time an ambulance arrives I could either be dead or much more seriously ill.

Significant numbers of people are dying unnecessarily because of long waits for medical treatment. It's estimated that there were almost 300 deaths a week associated with long accident and emergency waits in 2023.

Neither the British government or the Northern Irish government show any sense of urgency in getting the NHS back to its former high standards, the standards that were once seen as the envy of the world. Now the healthcare systems of many other countries are seen as better than the NHS.

We oldies and our multiple medical issues are often blamed for the parlous state of the NHS, but of course that's nonsense. The problem is a much more general one - lack of staff, lack of money, lack of up-to-date equipment, lack of efficient organisation.

More and more people are resorting to private healthcare as the NHS fails them. People who've been waiting absurd lengths of time for surgery, scans, physiotherapy or other procedures, people who've been in agonising pain for months or even years, are having to fall back on private provision to get the immediate attention they need. But of course many people simply can't afford to go private, they just don't have the spare cash.

And the situation isn't going to improve any time soon.

Going private

Given that the waiting time for NHS surgery can now be several years, Jenny and I have decided that if either of us needed urgent surgery, we would have to do the unthinkable and opt to use a private hospital.

But one thing that bothers us about private surgery is that if anything goes horribly wrong, the hospital won't be able to deal with it (as most of them don't have intensive care units) and we'd have to be transferred to an NHS hospital. Which was easy enough a few years ago before the ambulance crisis, but now you may have to wait several hours for an ambulance, by which time you could be dead or much more seriously ill.

As we're both in fairly good physical health and have no problematic medical conditions, we assume that the chances of an unexpected medical emergency are pretty small, but even supposedly routine operations can lead to unforeseen mistakes and catastrophes.

Literally tens of thousands of people are dying because they're not getting prompt medical attention from the NHS. Ambulances are overwhelmed, A&E departments are overwhelmed, hospital wards are overwhelmed. We don't want to end up as another delayed-treatment statistic.

If either of us need urgent surgery, goodness knows what decision we'll make. All I know is that more and more people are going private because of the huge NHS waiting lists. They're willing to take risks in order to end chronic pain and get a normal life back.