I found the British healthcare system to be characterized by  common sense 
and decency when my mother was hospitalized in Georgetown, the Cayman 
Islands in 1978.  I was given a free room and food because there was a free 
room and enough food.  She paid around $250 for a five day stay.
Ray


Why I love Britain's socialized healthcare system
As I learned when my newborn daughter was very sick, in U.K. hospitals, 
people take care of each other
By Stephen Amidon
Aug. 22, 2009 |

My eldest daughter had a rough first week. Born after 22 hours of hard 
labor, her pink skin proceeded to turn an alarming shade of yellow on the 
second day of her life. It was a bad case of jaundice. She would need to be 
placed in an incubator, whose ultraviolet light would hopefully clear up the 
condition. If not, a transfusion would be required. My exhausted wife and I 
watched in numb horror as our child was encased in the clear plastic box 
that was to become her crib for the next seven days. What we had hoped would 
be a straightforward delivery had turned into a nightmare.

Because I am American, and those endless days and nights were spent in a 
maternity hospital in London, the week that followed has been very much on 
my mind as I listen to the recent attacks on the British National Health 
Service. It is a system that I found to be very different from the one 
currently being described as "evil" and "Orwellian" by politicians and 
commentators eager to use it as an example of the dark side of public 
medicine.

I was initially skeptical about the NHS. I'd grown up comfortably in 
suburban New Jersey; good private healthcare was always immediately 
available through my father's insurance. When my English wife became 
pregnant soon after we settled in London, I was alarmed by the idea of 
having our first child born in a system I had been told was underfunded, 
overstressed and inefficient. After all, healthcare in the UK was free. How 
good could it be? Friends and relatives back in the States were spending 
thousands to have children. If you get what you pay for, I was about to get 
a whole lot of nothing.

My first glimpse of our prospective hospital was not promising. It seemed 
crowded, aging and apparently devoid of the gleaming, beeping equipment I 
associated with modern medicine. But our neo-natal class actually helped me 
prepare for the upcoming birth, and the scans we received afforded the same 
miraculous fetal glimpses we would have gotten back in New Jersey. Come 
delivery day, an impressive team of midwives, nurses and anesthesiologists 
attended my wife's long labor, all of them respecting her request not to opt 
for a cesarean section. When things got sticky at the end, a senior 
obstetrician appeared and the monitoring equipment beeped reassuringly.

Directly following the birth, we were taken to a large ward whose 20-odd 
beds were separated by curtains and changing tables. It was visiting hour; 
the place was alive with excited relatives, shellshocked fathers and the 
constant susurrus of hungry new life. That first night, however, the 
atmosphere grew peaceful. Crying babies were attended immediately by 
sensibly-shod nurses so that others could sleep. But it was after my 
daughter began to turn the color of saffron rice that I really began to 
appreciate the NHS. The moment she showed distress, we were whisked off to a 
private room, where we were looked after by a no-nonsense pediatrician and 
the imposing Irish ward sister, or chief nurse, who quickly made it clear to 
me that my sole useful contribution to the whole process had come nine 
months earlier. Blood was drawn regularly from our daughter's tiny heel; 
test results came back promptly. The meals were surprisingly edible. I even 
developed a taste for the milky tea brought to me by kind nurses. My only 
complaints over the following week were that the free cookies in the father's 
lounge were always running out. And for some reason the ward sister kept 
giving me withering looks, no matter how dutifully I attended to my family's 
needs.

As my blindfolded daughter slept in the incubator's eerie violet glow, I 
would take occasional strolls through the ward. It was the most egalitarian 
place I had ever seen. The yuppie woman honking into her newfangled cell 
phone, the young Pakistani mother who always seemed to be surrounded by a 
half-dozen gift-bearing relations, the self-sufficient older woman desperate 
to get home to look after her other children -- all of them were cared for 
in exactly the same manner. Whoever needed help got it. When a terrified 
Afghani girl arrived, rumored to be only 14 and apparently abandoned by her 
family, several nurses dropped what they were doing to teach her the 
rudiments of child care. The rest of the mothers waited patiently until they 
were finished. Other wards were the same. There was no private wing with 
champagne service. Everybody was in this together. If you were a woman and 
you were in labor and you were in our part of London, this is where you 
came. If things went wrong, skilled doctors appeared with the latest 
technology. Nobody asked about insurance or co-pays.

This, I learned, is what the NHS is about -- common decency. It is about the 
shared belief that all the people who live in the United Kingdom constitute 
a society, and a decent society provides certain necessities for its 
members. Freedom from hunger is one. Police protection is another. Free 
healthcare from the cradle to the grave is simply one more item on this 
list.

I saw this decency at work countless times over the following decade, until 
my return to the United States. I saw it with the twice-daily home visits by 
community midwives for the fortnight after each of our newborn children's 
release from hospital, and in the vouchers for free milk we were given for 
those babies. I saw it when our GP paid us a house call early one Sunday 
morning to treat our son's spiking fever.

I saw it most clearly, however, in the treatment my in-laws received at the 
end of their lives. My wife's father, who suffered from acute myloid 
dysplasia, spent his last year receiving constant care, including several 
sprints to the hospital for emergency transfusions, where doctors struggled 
heroically to keep him alive. His final week was spent in a very comfortable 
single hospice room whose French doors opened onto a terrace overlooking his 
beloved Yorkshire moors. When he died, he left us his house, and not a penny 
of healthcare debt. My mother-in-law, stricken by arthritis, got two 
artificial hips and two knees from the NHS, and received daily home visits 
from social workers during the last three years of her life so she would not 
have to go into a nursing home. Neither of these septuagenarians was working 
at the time. The amount of money spent on their care must have been 
staggering. And yet, despite shouldering this yoke of decency, the nation 
prospered around them. People were buying French wine and German cars and 
second homes. They were attending Cats and supporting Arsenal and going on 
holidays in the sun. Sure, people complained about the NHS. But the British 
complain about everything. Living without a public health system, on the 
other hand, was unthinkable.

On the day we were finally given the all-clear, there were no papers to 
sign, no bills to settle. All we had to do was remove our daughter's 
blindfold and go. But I felt I had to leave something behind. So I rushed 
down to the local corner shop and bought several tins of cookies to give the 
staff who'd looked after us so well. As luck would have it, the Irish ward 
sister was the only one at the nurse's station when I arrived.

Before I could explain myself, she gave me a tight, approving smile.

"Wondered when you'd start chipping in," she said, returning to her 
paperwork. "Just leave them in the father's lounge."
-- By Stephen Amidon


Rayilyn Brown
Director AZNPF
Arizona Chapter National Parkinson Foundation
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