'NHS workers are achieving the impossible and it makes me feel ashamed'

07 February 2023 , 16:43

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Nurses treating others with warmth and respect (Image: Getty Images)

Someone I love has died. She’d been in hospital since early December, just as the NHS crisis began to peak – and we know the rest; the ­monumental waits, the often devastating consequences, the terrible state of everything.

And that is true, of course, and much, much more. But I want to tell you about another side. What’s going on quietly behind the scenes, against all odds.

The care my family member received was exemplary. Consistent. Faultless. She told me so every time I visited.

It was one of the last things she ever said tome.

The hospital was like a war zone, the building literally crumbling, there were holes in the faded, peeling grey walls of the wards and corridors.

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They were clearly, even to my completely untrained eye, woefully short staffed. And yet in the worst conditions, they somehow provided the very best care. They were gentle, respectful, kind. Calm, efficient, attentive.

When they were in the room, they made us feel like they had all the time in the world, that this was their only patient, their number one priority, and yet sometimes, as they left, I couldn’t help but notice them break into almost a gallop, as they had so much to do, so many to help.

They achieved the impossible. They treated one of the most important people in my life exactly as I wanted them to be treated. They spoke to her warmly and politely, explained everything they were doing, even when it was unlikely she could hear them any more.

And as they extended their compassion to us too, answering difficult questions with empathy, offering tea, you know what I felt?

Ashamed. Genuinely ­embarrassed and mortified to live in a country where these ­extraordinary heroes are forced to strike to be paid fairly. Not even well. Just fairly.

The doctors and nurses I’ve recently been around enabled us to just about bear the unbearable.

I’d appreciate this massively even if they were being ­generously compensated, ­treasured, working in swish, comfortable, state-of-the-art premises.

That they’re doing it while being so undervalued that they’re having to fight for a living wage, in decrepit buildings, without enough people or resources, fully takes my breath away.

I don’t understand how they’re managing it, day in day out, with no end in sight. I can never thank them enough.

I hope even one of them – or any of the NHS workers doing the same up and down the country – sees this and is reminded of the enormous ­difference they make, how much they mean, how grateful so many of us are to them. It’s unlikely though.

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Hard to imagine any of them having time to read a paper.

Polly Hudson