Bridget Chapman knows her symptoms sound silly – loud burps, trapped wind and tummy aches – but the debilitating pain she feels is anything but.
The therapist, 55, who supports patients with anxiety and depression in Darlington, spent years mistaking this all for IBS until it proved too much.
She was diagnosed last year with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), a condition when stomach acid shoots back up into the oesophagus.
Then came the gallstones.
‘My local hospital didn’t have the facilities for an endoscopy so I had to go to a private hospital out of the area to be urgently seen,’ Bridget tells Metro.co.uk.
‘Then it was passed on to a specialist consultant who let my GP know, who said I need surgery to have my gall bladder removed, but they didn’t say: “You have to wait this many weeks for it.”
‘I don’t have a clue when it’ll be.’
Bridget still hasn’t had the operation. Until then, all she can do is pop her daily pills, skip meals to ease the pain and phone the clinic to ask for updates.
‘What is so unfair, is people who have money can go private,’ Bridget says, with gallbladder surgery costing nearly £5,000 at some clinics.
‘If I had a lot of money in the bank, I would pay privately. But I don’t, so I rely on the NHS.’
The main selling point of the NHS is simple: tax-funded, universal healthcare. After the agony of World War Two, politicians introduced the service in 1946 to ‘improve the physical and mental health of the people’.
The NHS makes more than half of the public more proud to be British than the nation’s history, culture or democracy.
But in conversations with Metro.co.uk, patients, health experts and campaigners say the future of the NHS keeps them up at night. No one blames people for cutting the line by going private.
‘What we have is a publicly-funded healthcare system that is creaking at the seams,’ says Siva Anandaciva, a chief analyst at the health think-tank King’s Fund.
‘People are making a choice. They’re feeling forced into seeking healthcare from other places, either abroad or privately.
‘At the same time, even if this isn’t surprising, I don’t think it’s something we should normalise. We can’t get blasé about it.
‘That’s not what healthcare in this country was designed to look like.’
‘Funding’ is a word that, Anandaciva says, comes up a lot when discussing how the NHS got into this position.
Spending in real terms on the NHS has been on the up every year since the mid-1950s, according to King’s Fund. Yearly health and social care spending between 2022/23 and 2024/25 is projected to increase by 0.1%.
Yet that money isn’t going far these days, says Mark Thomas, the author of the author of 99% and a visiting professor at Spain’s IE Business School.
‘If you’re prepared to ignore inflation, the growth and ageing of the population, and the explosion in poverty and obesity-related diseases, mental health issues and long Covid, if you ignore all of those, then the picture looks good,’ he says.
‘The NHS, despite what the government says, has been underfunded. And when a health service is underfunded, you reduce capacity. Reduce capacity, you build a backlog and weaken the population’s health.’
All of this is being felt by patients especially, says Thomas. Patients in corridors rather than beds, hours-long queues for A&E and days-long waits for an ambulance among them.
Waiting weeks for surgery is another. As of December, 7,600,000 people are on waiting lists for consultant-led elective care. Of them, 337,000 people have waited for more than 52 weeks. The median wait for treatment is now 15 weeks.
This backlog isn’t anything new, stresses Thomas, the chief economic commentator for the Financial Times: ‘It was never zero as it can’t get to zero but it has been very much lower.’
‘In a nutshell, we’ve got a model which when it was properly funded,’ before the early 2010s,’ he adds, ‘was the global gold standard.
‘Now we’ve been underfunding it. If we fund it properly, it is sustainable – but if we fail, we’re going to cripple the economy.’
Some politicians, Anandaciva adds, see privatisation as the answer to this. The NHS already relies on private health providers, with about 6% or so of healthcare provided by private clinics.
Going private can mean different things. Patients may pay using the cash in their back pocket, others go into debt or use fundraising websites to afford treatment from a private clinic hundreds of miles away.
‘Some of the procedures people are trying to raise funding for are essential procedures to either extend their life or to materially improve their lives,’ Anandaciva says.
‘We’re talking people who have cataracts who want to be able to see.’
Helen Field, a retired teacher in the Hampshire town of Totton who is losing her sight, isn’t close to doing this yet.
The 70-year-old always had an inkling she’d go blind. Growing up, she spent afternoons running to the library to grab large-print books for her partially blind mother.
Helen’s mother – and years later, Helen and her sister, too – had Fuchs’ dystrophy. The often genetic condition causes corneal cells that pump out stale fluid to deteriorate. Over time, liquid builds up, impacting a person’s sight.
‘You have to wave your hand in front of me to get my attention. It’s so strange not being able to see people’s faces,’ Helen says.
After a 21-month wait, Helen received a cornea transplant for her left eye in November. When the next one will be is uncertain.
‘I saw a consultant the week after the operation to check everything was fine,’ she says. ‘”See you in six weeks”, he said to me. When I got the appointment, it was in four months.
‘I’ve got a happy ending – for one eye, at least.’
Helen, who chairs a Unite trade union branch, says she would never go private as it is against her ‘principles’. (How a corneal transplant costs nearly £10,000 per eye at some private clinics is another reason.)
Such values are shared by Johnbosco Nwogbo, the lead campaigner at We Own It, a nonprofit that believes essential services such as public transport, water or post, should not be privatised. And that list includes the NHS.
‘The NHS is by far the thing that represents our nation the best,’ Nwogbo says. ‘It shows that we look after each other. That is why we are so proud of this wonderful invention.’
Privatisation is made out to be the obvious solution to these problems by politicians, he adds, but doing so would be ‘costly, inefficient and deadly’.
Pam Remon, 80, fears that if British politicians embrace privatisations, the NHS will be split into a two-tier system, not unlike the US.
‘It’s a very slow process so that people will be pushed to private – the end game is private insurance,’ the retiree who volunteers for a homeless shelter in Bromley, south-east London says. ‘They want to copy the American model.’
Pam suffers from a large hiatus hernia – so a part of her stomach is bulging into her chest, making breathing difficult – and has been waiting about a year for treatment.
Most healthcare in the US is delivered by for-profit and non-profit entities, where insurance plans are the only way not to wind up with five-figure medical bills.
More vulnerable Americans can rely on federal health insurance plans such as Medicare. While they’re touted as ‘affordable’, premiums, deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs can pile up quickly, Pam stresses.
The government, she feels, have had a ‘very slow plan to run down the NHS because they know they wouldn’t be able to do it suddenly’.
‘I’m so angry people don’t know what’s going on, and they all think it’s to do with funding. The funding has been cut, but it won’t make a difference, they want it to happen regardless,’ she says.
‘I’m at the end of my life, but I feel sorry for the people coming up now.’
But healthcare in the UK won’t be privatised anytime soon, Nwogbo says. Not in his lifetime, that’s for sure.
‘Not because there aren’t people trying to take us there,’ he says, ‘but because I feel confident that the British public will fight back and win.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
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