Sometimes it’s not until you have experience of something, that you realise things are not quite as you thought.

For the past four weeks, I have seen the NHS in a very different light, as my mum has been in hospital with complications following rib fractures.

Ever since I started working within the NHS 16 years ago, I have been a ferocious defender of what I considered to be our biggest national asset – free healthcare for all.

We are allegedly the envy of the world with the system that was set up in 1948 and it’s true, we are lucky to have access to healthcare when so many around the world are not so fortunate.

But with a general election looming, suddenly the NHS has been thrown into the spotlight and coupled with my own experiences over the past month, it looks a lot like we may be teetering on the edge of a healthcare disaster.

Hospitals are massive organisations that have a huge responsibility to their patients, many of whom are paying the tax and national insurance which is being used to fund the NHS.

One of the biggest problems that I have found with hospitals over the past month, has been the lack of apparent organisation and communication between everyone who comes into contact with a patient.

In trying to speak with a consultant, I have literally been all around the houses, transferred from person to person in an attempt to ask simple questions that would reassure my mum and allay our fears.

There appears to be no one who is willing to take overall responsibility and explain the variations in the advice and treatment she has been given. My experiences of referring my own dental patients in Oxford into NHS hospitals are similar.

The systems in place to allegedly make everything run more smoothly, rarely work and so often the process becomes unnecessarily complicated.

Healthcare is complex and often multi-disciplinary but surely we can find a system that works more efficiently, after all there is a whole layer of managers whose job this appears to be.

Lack of funding is usually cited as the downfall of the NHS but it only takes cursory investigation to see different health authorities paying vastly different amounts for basic supplies, incinerating millions of pounds of unused drugs primarily down to appalling stock control and paying hugely over the odds for agency staff.

If a supermarket can service thousands of stores and manage to make a profit, I just don’t see why hospitals can’t streamline themselves.

In a dental practice, everything is costed and wastage is kept to a minimum which, in turn, keeps the costs down. This doesn’t mean that we scrimp on anything to the detriment of our patients but we all know what the running costs are and we shop around for the best value materials.

I very much doubt it would be possible to find more than a handful of medical bureaucrats who would have any idea of the specific cost of a hip replacement or a cataract operation.

Cost should never be the driver behind how we approach healthcare but if no one has a handle on these things, how can we plan for the future?

It seems an unreasonable argument to suggest that treatments cannot be given due to cost when billions of pounds are literally slipping through the cracks that no one seems to want to try to fix. At the moment, the way is open for private companies to take over parts of the NHS and rest assure these companies are not doing this out of a sense of national responsibility; there is profit to be made.

Why is a massive organisation like the NHS not producing lines of own brand dressings, plasters and drugs, and training and employing adequate staff and retaining some of this cash to reinvest?

Maybe now is the time to introduce nominal charges for services we all expect like proper access to our GP.

I don't have all the answers but we need to wake up to the fact that the NHS is not the national flagship we are told it is, and find someone to start taking some responsibility in an attempt to steer the tanker before it crashes catastrophically.

If only we had a person who would take that responsibility... oh, hang on a moment, Jeremy Hunt it’s over to you.

  • Do you want alerts delivered straight to your phone via our WhatsApp service? Text NEWS or SPORT or NEWS AND SPORT, depending on which services you want, and your full name to 07767 417704. Save our number into your phone’s contacts as Oxford Mail WhatsApp and ensure you have WhatsApp installed.