I START with a case history from 33 years ago. Susan’s mother called from Swanage saying she felt ill but the GP was yet to find a cause. We met her half way at Bridport. She had painless jaundice. Within a day or two Dr Darcy at the Kingskerswell practice diagnosed cancer of her pancreas. She was admitted to Torbay Hospital a few days later where Paul Houghton carried out a bypass operation so bile could enter the duodenum without obstruction. Jaundice is unsightly and often causes a general itching.

She was soon back in our home in Combe-in-Teignhead. The district nurse from the practice arranged for help from the Marie Curie and MacMillan foundations. Sue was a State Registered Nurse who had in addition gained an Orthopaedic Nursing Certificate. Those two years at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital had given her the best training in ward nursing. Young Irish men with TB of the hip and others grossly disabled by polio often spent months in hospital.

So her mother Kathleen had the best professional care – loving care. She died in peace in our home about three months later, her pain eased by IV morphine. She did not have to wait outside a hospital with the engine running whilst a bed was found in a corridor. We were short of beds then. There were never enough for the older ladies with fractures in Ainslie Ward. I used to go often to other wards to see ‘outliers’ on my pre-operative rounds.

The fact is that OUR NHS has been dismantled surreptitiously ie quietly, over 40 years. This was by intention but the reader will not know it. Go on to ‘halpin surgeon’ if you have a computer or cell phone. On the home page and down on the right is “A Quotation From: The NHS Dismantled.”

In his report to the Conservative Party’s Economic Reconstruction Group in 1977, Nicholas Ridley wrote that: ‘...denationalisation should not be attempted by frontal attack but by preparation for return to the private sector by stealth. We should first pass legislation to destroy the public sector monopolies. We might also need to take power to sell assets. Secondly, we should fragment the industries as far as possible and set up the units as separate profit centres.’

 The same strategy for OUR NHS was in a book by Letwin and Redwood but that was priced at £800! But there was no political party monopoly in this. In 2005 a talk by me to be held in Totnes was widely advertised. Under the Blair regime – ‘neo-liberal’ like the other two ‘parties’, the community hospitals were being lined up for closure.

I wrote to clerks to the town councils, like say Ashburton, where these vital hospitals worked, and usually very well. The title that July was ‘Your NHS. Going, going, gone’. John Lister, a well known health economist drove from Oxford with my funding, to deal with the Private Finance Initiative, grasped vigorously by that regime. This was an ‘off balance sheet’ sleight of hand for jam today.

About 35 turned up – mostly GP friends and their wives, and just one councillor who left early! A warning given by a surgeon who had treated many in South Devon was not worth listening to regarding a service vital to us all. ‘They would take care of us’.

I am certain that in the minds of some people who have control, there is the strong urge that a universal NHS is too good, and potentially too expensive, for the common woman and man. 

So now is the time for a revolution of the mind, and for a wide determination to rebuild OUR NHS, and with that to recover national morale – so much lowered at present. This is a quotation from a 43 minute talk on video listed on my website of the same title -

‘When we lift up the sick and weary, everyone is lifted up’.

Next week I will deal with the bedrock of OUR NHS – general practice, or in older words, the family doctor, this being the key to its rebuilding.