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Becoming a Midwife

70 years of the NHS

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For those of you that aren’t aware, the National Health Service is approaching its 70th birthday on the 5th of July 2018, and for this month’s blog post I have been asked to think back and reflect on my experiences of the NHS and what it means to me. As a student midwife/soon-to-be midwife, I have been working in a big London NHS hospital for the last 3 years and have seen first-hand both the amazing work that NHS staff do as well as the enormous strains growing every day on an already vulnerable structure.

The NHS is one of the largest employers in the world (alongside the Indian railways and the Wal-Mart supermarket chain). The NHS in England treats more than 1.4 million patients every 24 hours and is expected to spend £126 billion in 2019 helping to care for the 1.4 million people that need it, including 23 million admissions to accident and emergency departments- a 23% higher statistic than a decade earlier. We have come leaps and bounds in research in hundreds of areas of medicine, including reproduction and plastic surgery, and due to the excellent quality of care provided by the NHS, people live on average 12 years longer than they did 50 years ago.

In preparation for this blog, I started to reflect on the past (as you often do as a student midwife) and made a list of everything the NHS has done for me, over the last 21 years of my life. Hence, once you have read my list, why don’t you have a think about what would be on your list as well. Often politically, people have plenty to say about the state of the NHS and its many failures, but I encourage those sceptics to take a step back and think where they would be, and where their friends and family would be, without the free healthcare provided by the NHS.

 

  1. NHS services brought me safely into this world along with 3 healthy sisters, 4 (+1 pending) cousins, friends, work colleagues as well as the 40+ babies that the NHS has supported me as a student midwife to safely deliver into the world.
  2. Vaccinations free of charge at ages 8 weeks, 12 weeks, 16 weeks, 1 year, 3 years, 12 years and 14 years to protect me from meningitis, hepatitis B, tetanus, polio, whooping cough, the flu, HPV and diphtheria.
  3. The NHS paid for a nurse in my school to look after me when I was sick, to bandage up my scabby knees and educate me on my physical and mental health- teaching me about safe sex and healthy relationships, as well as healthy eating and puberty.
  4. Aged just 3 years old my sister was diagnosed with encephalitis; a condition which causes areas of her brain to swell and without urgent NHS treatment, would have caused her to go permanently blind by the time she hit 4 years old. Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been spent in the background of her numerous operations and doctors’ appointments, medications and chemotherapy, without asking for a penny from my family to fund this.
  5. When I was 15, I had an operation on my toe to cure an ingrowing toenail and aged 16 I had oral surgery to uncover a tooth that had lodged in the roof of my mouth. Aged 17 I received free counselling to help me with the grief of my parents’ divorce, and the same counselling services has helped one sister come to terms with her medical condition and my other sister battle a mental health condition- which would no doubt have spiralled out of control without the NHS staff that stuck by her through her treatment.
  6. In September 2015, my grandma had a fall that could have changed her life forever. Doctors told her without an innovative surgery requiring a piece of equipment pricing in at an eye watering £20,000, she would never walk again. After the surgery, and weeks of inpatient care, physiotherapy support, pain management teams and home visit teams, she walks almost as well as she did before and is improving every day thanks to the selfless hours of hard work by NHS staff.
  7. Aged 18, I made the decision to train as a midwife and join the enormous team that forms the backbone for the NHS. In return for working for them for 3 years whilst training, the NHS has paid thousands of pounds to put me through university and allow me in 2 short months to qualify as a very skilful and passionate NHS midwife.
  8. During my training following a free routine breast check-up, I found myself requiring help from the NHS once again, and although a scary time for me, I felt well supported by the staff and well cared for by the team of medical professionals. I spent hours sat in the waiting area for appointments that were often 2-3 hours late, run by exhausted staff who were on the brink of collapse from a service drowning under its obligations to its patients, and from a severe lack of funding- but, as I too have often had to remind myself, all of these problems are managed so that people like me can get these services for free.
  9. Looking into the future, I plan to live a long happy life both working for and receiving care from the NHS. I, by no means, think that this is perfect, and I have no doubt that there are an awful lot of problems in the system that need addressing- but I am incredibly passionate that England’s population deserves free healthcare, and more importantly than that, believe we need free healthcare- or who knows what state our population will be left in. Even looking back at my list, my life would have been affected in so many ways if I had been required to pay for even one of the many services I have utilized in the past. And so, on the NHS’s 70th birthday, I have so much to be thankful for and I hope for a more positive future of the service.

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City, University of London is an independent member institution of the University of London. Established by Royal Charter in 1836, the University of London consists of 18 independent member institutions with outstanding global reputations and several prestigious central academic bodies and activities.

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