The NHS
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 2:58 am
Displayed, not particularly prominently, on an otherwise bare wall in the entrance of the Springfield building, the headquarters of the university hospitals of North Midlands NHS trust in Stoke-on-Trent, is a small plaque.
“A patient,” it discreetly says, “is not an interruption to our work, [but] the purpose of it. They are not an outsider in our hospital, they are a part of it. We are not doing them a favour by serving them, they are doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so.”
Britain’s National Health Service is a sprawling, many-layered and infinitely complex thing; an institution famed around the world yet reviled here, at times, as much as it is revered; an organisation so large that the numbers beggar belief.
Famously, the NHS provides care that is free at the point of delivery to everyone resident in the United Kingdom. It treats 1m cases every 36 hours. Its annual budget is £136.7bn. But as that plaque reminds us, the NHS is, at bottom, about people serving other people. Across the country, 1.6 million people work for the NHS. It is, astonishingly, the world’s fifth biggest employer, smaller than the US defence department and the Chinese army, but bigger than the Indian railways and Foxconn.
It employs more than one in 20 of the working population: in England alone, it employs more than 40,000 GPs, 350,000 nurses, 18,000 qualified ambulance staff and hundreds of thousands of other people in more than 350 jobs.
Nearly 80% of its workforce are women, and as many as 11% – including 13% of clinical professionals and 24% of doctors – are from overseas: India, the Philippines, Poland, Nigeria, Portugal, Pakistan, Spain.
At a critical moment in the NHS’s history, as demand for the care it provides soars and questions over its viability mount, how do its employees feel about their jobs, their employer, its future – and what “the opportunity to serve” actually means for them?
The Guardian spoke to staff at three major English hospitals: Royal Stoke University; St George’s, Tooting; and Southampton General. Here is what they said.