THE BIG ISSUE The Big Issue - 11 January 2016 | Page 13

WorldMags.net JOHN BIRD Staying healthy is the best cure for our NHS I squeezed into a seat on a train that was part-blocked by a woman’s mobility trolley. I was happy to accommodate. In the space of a 12-minute journey she gave a rundown of 55 years of health calamities that had befallen her. And how the NHS had grown around her as her complaints and illnesses multiplied. And how she was lost without her trolley, not able to hold herself upright. She was cursed as a child with breathing problems, and these combined with kidney problems. I can’t say I managed to keep up with the list but she seemed resolute and determined, showing a completely diferent grasp of history to any that I had ever thought about. She did not seem to measure her life in terms of prime ministers, pop stars, authors or outrageous exposés. The Chilcot Inquiry and the Profumo Afair may have been important but what she told us in those 12 minutes was all about how the NHS had always been there for her. Her heroes and heroines were doctors and nurses, specialists and medical innovators. TV, telephony and other gadgetry may have developed in leaps and bounds but she was more transfixed by how the health service had kept her alive. And not only kept her alive but also kept her sprightly, talkative, happy and, yes, to some extent content. Her great story was her own body and its limitations. She was a living embodiment of what we need to be proud of; the usages to which our taxes are put. Thousands will have been spent on her, and she was not one to knock it. Nor should we. The hospital, though, that is her magnet, her alma mater, has recently been put into the shadows by financial shortfalls. Management has resigned. Budgets have been impossible to be met, according to statements. The hospital in question will survive. But there is something wrong with the structure that runs it, according to oicial reports. What the woman I met on the train seems to underline is how necessary it is for as many people as possible to stay healthy. Because with people who need continuous health innovations and constant support, you need many more people not drawing on the service. Hence for every case like my fellow passenger, we need dozens who do not need a doctor from one end of their lives to the other. Therefore we need to return to ‘Social Medicine’, one of the first innovations of the new welfare state, back in 1948. Which was to send specialists and practitioners out into the community and help people become educated in good health. Unfortunately prevention, which is now a bit of a buzz term again, is still only less than one per cent of our health budget. If we want to be able to help my fellow passenger on the train, we need to up that figure. So that those who are stuck in the realms of bad health are given a Rolls-Royce Service. You don’t want to be stinting on support when life and death is on the cards. And you don’t want to stint on preventing able-bodied people slipping into ill health. Because for every able-bodied person who is kept healthy, it is another piece of good fortune for the physically unfortunate. One person’s good health is another person’s expensive miracle drug programme. “With people who need continuous health innovations and constant support, you need many more people not drawing on the service” THE BIG ISSUE / p13 / January 11-17 2016 WorldMags.net The bitter arguments about the need to fight for the NHS against profiteers should not blind us to the fact that we are producing a far unhealthier society than need be. Through lifestyle choices, from what we drink to what we eat, and how much exercise we choose to have. Sugar, the great killer of modern times, still looms unresolved over our children’s health, and the health of many who are made unhealthy because of its efects. It is a real struggle to keep sugar out of your life or reduce it to the levels that are acceptable to good health. It sneaks in everywhere, from bread to soup, from meat to spreads. This is up there with HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. But instead of Martians taking over, it’s sugared drinks and sweetened scoops of food. No, I haven’t read the latest book about the evils of sugar, nor have I followed TV programmes that state the bald and bare facts. Rather I have tried to keep sugar out of my children’s life and found it virtually impossible. At the beginning of the year, at least for the month of January, we should be looking for new ways of doing old things; better. Certainly the defence of the NHS should not be downplayed. But a better job at reducing the number of people who need its services would take a great weight of of our favourite institution. Me, I’m struggling, as I have written about recently. I’m not one of those knife-thin gorgers on good. I struggle with sugars and am addicted to bread. Bread and tea was the making of me. Busting bread’s vicious hold on me, and other assorted carbohydrates, is like wrestling with an anaconda. But I have found a universally available marmalade called St Dalfour. It uses only natural sugar from apple juice etc. Now I’m after a bread that doesn’t do what most breads normally do. And looking for an NHS that evange- lises that the best cure is to stay healthy. John Bird is the founder and Editor in Chief of The Big Issue. @johnbirdswords [email protected]