The NHS has a people problem: staff who lack compassion must be rooted out

Demoralised workers have become inured to suffering. Without fixing this, there is no hope for our health service

The trouble with the NHS is this… The real issue with healthcare in Britain is this… The fundamental reason for the chaos is…
We’ll be hearing a lot of sentences that begin this way as Labour puts on its big £165 billion paper pants and squares up to the sclerotic behemoth that is our National Health Service (sorry all you terminally useless Tory health secretaries – smelling salts are available from the 1922 Committee).
Grandiloquent experts will spout forth, tripping over each other to analyse what went wrong and how to fix it. Someone might even pompously attempt to convey the sheer scale of the challenge by claiming, “It’s like turning round an oil tanker.” But we Radio 4 listeners know from this week’s More or Less statistics programme that it only takes a smidge under five minutes for a 330-metre ship to swing 180 degrees.
There will be talk of digitisation, of preventative intervention and of the interconnection of primary, secondary and social care. All necessary, all in need of reform.
But if I could speak as a patient (and paraphrase Keir Starmer), the “biggest reimagining” of the NHS I can visualise would be giving this organisation back its heart.
For me, and a great many others who find themselves cowed and intimidated by the very medics we are reliant on for care, the NHS is first and foremost suffering from a people problem.
Before I am drowned out by a chorus of disapproval, I don’t mean all of its people. Family and friends report critical care is unparalleled; cancer teams routinely go the extra mile.
But I have found myself treated abominably. I have hollered in pain and distress as bungling nurses refused to read my notes and gave me the wrong treatment; I have been variously humiliated, mismanaged and – there is no other word for it – bullied.
If “lived experience” has any value, I could tell a tale or two about midwives more intent on meeting targets than keeping my baby alive; the incompetent agency nurse who for hours kept force-feeding me water for acute urine retention (a post-op condition that requires a catheter) until I was drenched in sweat and biting my arm in order not to scream. 
The irritated doctor who eventually came to my aid told me off for having a urethra that was too narrow – and tried unsuccessfully to catheterise me in full view of my fellow patients.
The staff nurse, who sneered that I “had only had metalwork removed” from my previously broken back, ordered me to go home as he needed the bed. He gestured me into a broken wheelchair without any brakes and I nearly skidded under the wheels of an ambulance on the way out.
Discharged too early and against all protocols, I was rushed into a different hospital that night.
I could detail how my brother-in-law, an ex-police officer, was left for no fewer than 49 hours on a trolley in A&E with three collapsed spinal discs. Robbed of all dignity, his pain management was patchy; the slightest movement sent his sciatic nerve into overdrive, electric shocks shooting down his legs.
“I felt as though I had been transported to the NHS version of Guantanamo Bay,” he told me. “No peace, no quiet, lights on round the clock. There I was, lying immobile in a public place in huge distress, but nobody seemed to see me or acknowledge me. After 30 hours, I literally cried myself to sleep.”
Mistakes happen, of course they do – resources are stretched; bed shortages are routine. But in what universe is it deemed acceptable to scold the sick and subject them to inhuman conditions? I don’t just mean the staff on the ground, but those higher up (to a large degree, they are the ones who create this culture).
But when you are in hospital, anxious and in pain, is it too much to expect – if not kindness – respect? Sadly, compassion is no longer a given. An elderly friend advises her circle to curry favour with the nurses as soon as they arrive on a ward in order to stand out.
“It’s a fact of life that poorly old ladies in hospital are ten-a-penny and nurses can be terribly brusque and brutal,” she says. “We get treated so grudgingly – if at all – that sucking up to them is the only way to be noticed.
“I am a retired professional with all my marbles, not some gaga old dear, but however much it sticks in my craw to fawn and flatter them by asking questions about their lives, I’ve learned that it’s the only way to make it out in one piece.”
What an indictment. That’s even before we touch on the fact that in the years since the NHS was founded, languishing in A&E has been more deadly than going to war.
This was highlighted by Lord Darzi, leading surgeon and former health minister, in his new report: “According to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine… long waits are likely to be causing an additional 14,000 deaths a year – more than double all British Armed Forces’ combat deaths since the health service was founded in 1948,” he concludes.
Fifteen years ago, patients turning up could expect to find 39 people ahead of them in the queue. Now the number is beyond 100.
Appalling figures. But those implementing change need to remember, need to be reminded, that behind every number is a person in extremis. Every death is a preventable tragedy. How scandalous that lives are being lost at such a rate in the one place they could be saved.
I don’t know the ins and outs of overhauling a system so huge and sprawling. Despite huge cash injections, productivity is low, demoralised staff have become inured to suffering and retention is an uphill struggle.
We bent over backwards to protect the NHS during the pandemic – at times, it felt as though its survival was deemed more important than our own. But what use is any healthcare model if those who work in it don’t care as much as they should?
Better pay, better training and – dare I say it – a way of rooting out those who are simply not of the required calibre should be a priority. People are the beating heart of healthcare; we must do what it takes to restore not just their sense of pride and duty but their compassion and humanity.