How can we claw back tender, loving healthcare from a tangle of red tape before it’s too late asks Dr Sophie Petit-Zeman

Dr Sophie Petit-Zeman

THE NHS is in a mess. Not terminal, but definitely serious. As it gets bigger, in some ways better, it brings more people more chance of better lives. Meanwhile, many of those who staff it are fast losing the will and ability to do so. Pushed into robot-mode by managers with books to balance and targets to meet, some feel stretched close to breaking point, while the huge, impersonal system leaves the less industrious, or the ruthlessly ambitious, free to behave badly, unnoticed.
And patients are getting lost in the melee. Take the focus on health promotion. Fine, but when the government produces a white paper called Choosing Health, surely it’s oversimplifying the issue?
We are told that eating and exercising correctly will keep us healthy, some try, while others know it’s just not true. We are told that we’ll soon be able to choose our hospital, that tomorrow will bring great new opportunities but too many of us are still fighting to see a doctor today.
As for trust, is it any wonder that it is hard to believe reassurances about vaccines when we still remember being promised that eating infected beef was fine? And on top of all that, we’re too often left wondering whether we’ll get a fatal bug if we ever get a hospital bed, or whether our GP will turn out to be a mass murderer – a psychotic killer failed by a system that doesn’t care.
Focusing all this uncertainty, and our dreams, the media do their bit too. Every day a new health story, a row, scandal, scare, tragedy or marvel. It all goes into the melting pot, fuelling discontent and disharmony between staff and users of the NHS, or simply raising hope beyond reality.
The general election certainly helped to make us pretty familiar with the cast of the great healthcare debate, and while that was being played out, I was pleased to know my book was rolling off the press.
A book which tries to make sense of it, to open it up. An easy read, it’s part fiction – look out for a sad walk on Primrose Hill – and part fact.
Writing the factual stuff was far less challenging: I just took the 21 big issues that people told me mattered most to them about the NHS, and dissected out the reality from the spin. From choice to communication, waiting lists to MMR and MRSA, I explain things we know of but often know little about, the ins and outs, drivers and obstacles, to treating each other well. What my non-medical French husband, reflecting on the trials and tribulations of the NHS, succinctly calls “the whole mess”. My book is not a propaganda spiel – I find it much harder to get enthused by politics than I do by real people – and it certainly doesn’t decry the NHS’s brilliant bits. While I used to have wait ages to see my Kentish Town GP, I can now go on the same day if I ring on the dot of 8.30am or 2pm and don’t mind about the appointment time. It’s not perfect, and the surgery still doesn’t open on Saturday mornings, but it’s good enough.
Most of all, it feels strangely human. I don’t know how they achieved it or whether something else that mattered has been lost, but I hope it was an amicable process born out of recognising that things weren’t working too well and that a simple remedy was both needed and possible.
If my book has one message it’s that it we’ve got to raise the debate about treating each other well when the chips are down, and that means recognising that we’re in this together. It’s dedicated in part to those who looked after my mother at Edenhall Marie Curie Centre in Belsize Park, where they really know about really caring.
I certainly don’t have all the answers, but hopefully ask some of the questions that matter. I hope the fiction entertains, and while some of the true stories are heart-warming, others make unpalatable, disturbing reading.
These are mostly unattributed – the places and people referred to will know where or who they are – and know too that they need to sharpen up their acts. Part of getting the NHS better has to include facing the fact that it’s not only grotty hospitals with rats under the floorboards that aren’t perfect. Even shiny, glossy places screw up, and musn’t be allowed to bully their way out of it.
On the night of the launch party last month, at Daunt Books, two women, one a doctor, came in, saying they were unashamed “gatecrashers”. Attracted by the array of copies in the window, they, like me, were hoping we really could make the NHS human again, and wanted to say good luck. It was warm and thoughtful. Just like it should be.

• Dr Sophie Petit-Zeman has worked in both the NHS and the private sector. She is a member of the executive committee of the Brain and Spine Foundation and a freelance journalist. She lives in Dartmouth Park, Highgate.

• Doctor, what’s wrong? Making the NHS human again, Routledge, £12.99.