Category — Health

Birth of the National Health Service

I can’t think why I’ve only just realized that I was born before the National Health Service came into being. Now, that may not strike non-UK readers as important, but those of us who’ve lived with and been treated by the NHS most or all of our lives are very happy that this extraordinary social institution is still with us after 60 years.

I was born in December 1947. My parents would have had to pay the hospital where I was born for its services. Now our medical treatment is free at the point of use.

The NHS was conceived in the middle of the Second World War, when Britain was almost on its economic knees. Before this visionary new service was born - on 5 July 1948, at a time of extraordinary privation for the British people - people who could afford it (including my parents) paid for medical treatment, and those who couldn’t afford it went without.

Women queuing for food in the severe winter of 1947

Despite all the NHS’s faults and weaknesses, I am grateful for the vision of William Beveridge and the determination Aneurin Bevan, health minister in the 1945 Labour government to ensure that…

…everybody, irrespective of means, age, sex or occupation shall have equal opportunity to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.

Of course, the NHS has never fully lived up to this promise, but as a retired GP who qualified as a doctor on the day the NHS began has commented:

Nobody realised how much unknown sickness there was until the NHS began. So many people just could not afford to go to the doctor. The new service uncovered a huge cavern of unmet need. There was an unprecedented rush to the GPs with problems people had been putting off for years. Before the NHS, healthcare in this country was a disaster, particularly if you were poor.

If you want to read the history of this great social invention, you can download Sixty Years of the National Health Service from the Department of Health website.

Celebration in Westminster Abbey

So around 2,000 of us - doctors, nurses, chaplains, patients, administrators, and many more - came to Westminster Abbey yesterday afternoon - to celebrate the NHS’s 60th birthday.

Prince Charles was there. The Prime Minister was there. And I was there, oh yes, I was there representing the UK Bahá’í community (I am one of two Bahá’í members of the Multi Faith Group for Healthcare Chaplaincy), and sitting next to Sikh, Muslim and Jewish friends.

Westminster Abbey has a grand way with these ceremonial occasions - processions, robes, choir, music, solemn language - and yesterday’s service was no exception.

(I was part of the small “other faiths” procession. It’s an awe-inspiring experience to follow a verger at the stately processional pace favoured by the Church of England through the Nave and into the Quire of this place where God has been worshipped by Christians for over a thousand years - although this particular building was begun in 1245 - watched by the congregation, who surely must have wondered at this motley group of besuited and unrobed men, one in a turban and one with a Jewish kippah.)

Reasons to be thankful

In his address the Rt Revd Michael Perham, Bishop of Gloucester and Chairman of the Hospital Chaplaincies Council, highlighted four reasons to be thankful on this occasion:

The first is that the National Health Service happened at all. It was a brave and visionary social revolution emerging, surprisingly, out of a world of post-war austerity. It was opposed by most of the professionals who would have to work within it. Its background was economic hardship and entrenched opposition. Yet it came into being, promoted by courageous politicians, and it was not very long before it was the pride and joy of the nation and the envy of the world. Give thanks!

The second is that it has continued to evolve, responding to radical change - not so much radical change imposed by politicians and administrators (though, of course, there has been that), but radical change brought about by medical advance and by new insights within the medical profession…

The third reason to rejoice is the huge satisfaction and pride that the people of this country still have in the Health Service. Politicians, challenging one another, rightly always want to get it better. Newspapers sometimes run horror stories of things that go wrong. Some people have a raw deal. This week’s BBC poll on the NHS found that 82% of people were still proud of the NHS and half of those still saw it as the envy of the world. I’d give a lot for a vote of confidence like that. Give thanks!

The fourth reason to celebrate? Simply this - and it’s hugely important. The Health Service work-force deserves honour and praise. Health care “professional” - I use the word in its widest meaning, doctors of many kinds, nurses of many kinds, administrators of many kinds, support workers of many kinds, chaplains of many faiths - continue to be people of dedication, continue to exercise care and compassion towards their patients. “Honour physicians for their services . . the skill of physicians makes them distinguished,” says the writer of Ecclesiasticus, and we need to widen that honouring of those who care for the sick and work for health to include the entire profession. For the people of the NHS, give thanks!

However,

That profound sense of thankfulness needs to be set against the inevitable difficulties that have been encountered as the NHS has tried to respond to change over the years. Nor will the difficulties vanish away, however much we try to anticipate change.

What of the future?

Bishop Michael’s conclusion contains wise words:

There is much that a future NHS will need that is beyond the knowledge of a bishop! There is probably much that is beyond the imagination of most of us. Our forebears in 1948, for all their vision, cannot have pictured the advances and the changes that we have seen. But I think I do know that, if the National Health Service is to continue to serve, it will need to hold on to two timeless truths.

• The human person is a wonderful combination of the physical, the mental, the social and the spiritual, a divine design beyond compare.

• To heal the sick and to make people healthy is a vocation, a collaboration with the God from whom all health and wholeness comes.

Reception

So, the service finished and we all ceremoniously recessed to the Great West Door. Outside in the Sanctuary, the Abbey bells rang through the light, persistent, rain. The congregation hoisted their umbrellas and trooped across the road into the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre for sandwiches, scones, tea, a speech by Alan Johnson, the Secretary of State for Health.

And for a song by soprano Lesley Garrett, who is married to a GP.

When he launched the NHS, Nye Bevan said:

We shall never have all we need. Expectations will always exceed capacity… The NHS must always be changing, growing and improving. It must always appear inadequate.

No wonder Lesley Garrett sang “To Dream the Impossible Dream”!

Technorati Tags: NHS, National Health Service, Westminster Abbey, 60th anniversary, Christian, Baha’i, Sikh, Muslim, chaplaincy

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This is remarkable video of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, recounting her experience of a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. She describes the big lesson she learns, that stilling the brain chatter of our left hemispheres and allowing the all-at-once, here-and-now, all-embracing perceptions of our brains’ right hemispheres to break down the barriers between us. It’s well worth watching. Deeply inspiring!

Technorati Tags: brain, stroke, haemorrhage, Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist, world peace, inspiration

British young people seem intent on drinking themselves and British society in a complete stupor. Our government believed that it could change the traditional British drinking culture of knocking back the booze until you fall over into a continental-style café culture of allegedly civilized drinking by allowing pubs and clubs to obtain licences to sell alcohol 24 hours a day.

This would, the story went, help regenerate run-down city centres into civilized piazzas with restaurants and bars and cafes frequented by well-heeled patrons eating and drinking moderately and enjoying their evenings out.

But the drinks industry, a monstrous beast whose main aim is to sky-rocket its profits, which it can do by selling vast quantities of cheap beer, wine, alcopops and spirits to 18-24 year olds, helped subvert the government’s café-culture dream world and turned it into a booze-filled nightmare of over-consumption and violence.

Of course, the drinks industry was swimming with a fast-flowing tide. A generation which was raised with a belief in its unlimited entitlement to whatever it wanted whenever it wanted it and which is the inheritor of a very long British history of binge-drinking (stand up and pour it down your neck until you fall over) was unlikely to resist the blandishments of the “happy hour” and cheap hooch. It was definitely not going to learn to sit for hours with its little finger crooked over a small white wine when it could blast its brains out 24-hours a day with high-alcohol-content drinks that tasted like lemonade.

in denial

Whose fault is this? The government’s? Well, I am sure that anyone with any brains left over after a stimulating night out could have told them the likely outcome of their strange fantasy about Britain becoming like an ad man’s version of France. According to Reuters, the government is in denial:

Despite violent crime between the hours of 3 and 6 a.m. rising by more than a quarter, the government will say the total amount of alcohol-related offences has fallen by three percent, the Daily Mail reported.

But Sir Simon Milton, the chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA) and leader of Westminster council, has labelled the new laws a “mistake”.

Is the fault of the drinks industry - manufacturers, pubs, clubs and retailers? Who’s going to turn down the opportunity of lots of lovely moolah when the government gives you such a legislative present?

What about local authorities? Shouldn’t they have exerted more control? Or the drinkers? Shouldn’t they have exercised more self-discipline?

There are plenty of people to blame for turning our city centres into weekend battlegrounds. And, what do you know? Everyone is passing the blame onto everyone else.

Anyway, we can be happy in the knowledge that 24-hour drinking will continue. The government has no intention of changing those laws. Instead, it will punish retailers who sell to underage drinkers and put out adverts warning of the dangers of excessive drinking. So that’s all right then.

But a combination of a “two strikes and you’re out” policy for retailers and public health messages for the drinkers really seems to miss the hard core of the problem. Yes, retailers should make sure they keep within the law, and, yes, public health messages make us all feel better – even if they don’t change our behaviour. But the root of this particular complex of problems lies in a moral crisis and a cultural narrative that says that getting ratted = having fun.

a fundamental moral crisis

According to Udo Schaeffer (in Baha’i Ethics in Light of Scripture: An Introduction)

We are facing a fundamental crisis of morals with far-reaching impact on the stability of the body politic. (p. 101)

What is the cause of this process and where it is leading us? In my view, the crisis of morality is a consequence of the crisis of religion. (p. 103)

The crisis of the Christian faith is closely connected with the the crisis of morality. Norms and moral values are of an axiomatic nature and cannot be proved exclusively by reason. They are linked to convictions, to faith. One must believe in them. Religion has been able to create a system of transcendent values and ideals, to sustain a hierarchy of values, declaring some of them to be absolute and universal, others to be relative and particular. (p. 105)

In the absence of a strong religious foundation for ethics and people’s ethical commitment, we try to rely on reason to derive our ethical principles. But the rational justification of morals fails precisely because there is no guarantee that everyone will be convinced by any given reason for a particular norm, no matter how cogent; there is no longer any “public, shared rationale or justification” for morality, as Alistair MacIntyre states in After Virtue

This means that there are no unconditional duties and no universally binding norms. Each one of us becomes the judge of our own morality and the arbiter of social order.

When these notions are detached from human self-responsibility and from the commitment to the common weal, they become nothing more than expressions of egoism and selfishness. (Schaeffer, Baha’i Ethics, p. 107)

Zygmunt Bauman points up the conclusion of this relativisation of value:

In the plural and pluralistic world of post-modernity, every form of life is permitted in principle, or, rather, no agreed principles are evident which may render any form of life impermissible. (”Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity.” Telos, no. 78, pp. 7-42.)

Says Schaeffer:

Society cannot survive once its members have lost the ability to share and sacrifice, once everyone emphasizes only his own rights and strives to serve only his own interests, once the highest aim in life is “fun”, once society is governed by hedonism and egoism…. The cultural crisis of the West … has developed into a global crisis of human civilization, one which gravely endangers the survival of mankind. (p. 108)

This is what Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Baha’i Faith wrote in in 1936 in one of his extraordinarily far-sighted World Order letters:

No wonder, therefore, that when, as a result of human perversity, the light of religion is quenched in men’s hearts, and the divinely appointed Robe, designed to adorn the human temple, is deliberately discarded, a deplorable decline in the fortunes of humanity immediately sets in, bringing in its wake all the evils which a wayward soul is capable of revealing. The perversion of human nature, the degradation of human conduct, the corruption and dissolution of human institutions, reveal themselves, under such circumstances, in their worst and most revolting aspects. Human character is debased, confidence is shaken, the nerves of discipline are relaxed, the voice of human conscience is stilled, the sense of decency and shame is obscured, conceptions of duty, of solidarity, of reciprocity and loyalty are distorted, and the very feeling of peacefulness, of joy and of hope is gradually extinguished. (Shoghi Effendi, World Order of Baha’u'llah, p .187)

Future perfecting

This would be a downbeat note on which to end this post. However, I believe that a new, religiously and spiritually founded morality is possible. Well, more than possible, it actually exists in the sacred Writings of Baha’u'llah, embodied (in embryonic form) in the life of the Baha’i community. As Baha’u'llah writes:

The purpose of the one true God in manifesting Himself is to summon all mankind to truthfulness and sincerity, to piety and trustworthiness, to resignation and submissiveness to the Will of God, to forbearance and kindliness, to uprightness and wisdom. His object is to array every man with the mantle of a saintly character, and to adorn him with the ornament of holy and goodly deeds. (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah, p. 299)

The alcoholic crisis of our city centres will never be solved by partial fixes to the licensing laws, nor, indeed, by a return to the status quo ante. No amount of policing is going to stop what is in fact a symptom of a deep spiritual and moral crisis. Nothing short of a renewal of a genuine and well-founded faith-based moral orientation is going to do the trick.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, alcohol, 24-hour drinking, licensing laws, morals, ethics, spirituality, Christianity

At long last it’s illegal to smoke in enclosed and partially enclosed public spaces in England. The ban came into force at 6 a.m. today. England is only now catching up with Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, where there are already similar bans.

Smoking is an odious and dangerous habit, and not only for those who smoke. I will be particularly happy to see an end to smoking in restaurants. In those restaurants with smoking and non-smoking zones, I would always end up on the non-smoking tables right next door to the smoking area.

Do you mind if I eat while you smoke?

No more of this - hooray!

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I returned home yesterday from giving the keynote presentation at a conference on The Importance of Faith in Healthcare at the Heartbeat Training Centre at Southampton General Hospital. The conference, organized by the chaplaincy team, attracted about 80 delegates. Some were serving chaplains, others were staff from various departments in the hospital. I had been invited to speak as the former Chair of the Multi Faith Group for Healthcare Chaplaincy.

My main message was that we all have spiritual needs, whether we are formally religious or not. Physical, mental and spiritual health all intersect and we are whole when we are healthy in all three spheres:

This being so, it is surely as important to pay attention to a person’s spiritual qualities and needs when they are in hospital as to their physical needs. It is the role of chaplains or spiritual care givers to offer health service patients and staff such support as they need in meeting their spiritual needs.

How to do this? Rumi points the way:

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.
Help someone

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