Although Britain is a nation with an Established Church, the Church of England, more people seem to be followers of Britain’s national secular religion, the National Health Service, than are members of the Anglican Communion. In Britain it doesn’t seem to matter what faith you are or what political stripe you are or even which gender you choose to sleep with, there seems to be some sort of unspoken requirement that you worship at the altar of the National Health Service (NHS). Support for the NHS is a cross party affair and the woe betide the politician, whether of the Left or of the Right who asks awkward questions about this behemoth or wonders whether healthcare could be provided in a better way. Social and political ostracism awaits any politician, whether they be Conservative or Labour who criticises the existence of the NHS.. Truly, speaking ill of the NHS is a taboo that is enforced with an almost religious intensity.

Well I will not worship any more at the altar of this secular god that has controlled nearly all healthcare in Britain since it was formed by Clement Atlee’s government in 1948. Both myself and my family and many of my friends have been ‘customers’ of the NHS, and I use that word loosely because no private business would treat its customers as badly as the NHS treats its patients. Because of my experience and the experiences of those I’ve known, I’ve had a peek behind the curtain and seen the reality behind the pro-NHS rhetoric. What I’ve seen is deeply unpleasant.

To be quite frank the NHS is shit. Of course it does some things, such as some adult and paediatric emergency medicine very well indeed, I’ve seen some very good emergency medicine practitioners in the NHS as well as some awful ones. However as for the rest of the NHS’s activity, from what I can see and from what my family and friends have experienced, oncology, general medicine, geriatric medicine, obstetrics, mental health etc, it is patchy in quality at best and woefully inadequate and cruel at its worst.

The experience of the NHS that my family and the families of those close to me has been pretty shit. I have encountered cancer patients shoved into side rooms along with unbagged piles of soiled dirty bedlinen, district nurses who refuse to change dressings, nurses whom one does not feel comfortable leaving vulnerable relatives with, poor aftercare for broken bones, doctors who screw up epidurals during childbirth and nurses on geriatric wards who can’t be arsed to feed patients who are unable to feed themselves. Whilst I admit and will readily praise healthcare staff such as nurses who do put themselves out for patients, there are too many front line hospital and other healthcare staff who are time servers, lazy, clock-watchers, incompetent or even cruel.

The NHS is also dominated, as all socialised medical systems are, with political concerns and in particular with political correctness, which in the NHS is both rampant, wasteful and damaging. I had listen to a nurse, during a regular vaccination appointment for my son, rant on about how Donald Trump was a driver of the anti vaccination movement and she refused to listen to my explanation that these anti vaccine loons existed long before Mr Trump became US President.

An MTF Transsexual friend of mine who went to hospital with crippling stomach and then chest and shoulder pain kept getting asked about ovarian cysts, ectopic pregnancy and other conditions that are 100% limited to genetic women, despite having the word ‘Trans’ readily visible in her medical records. The medical staff, eager to conform to politically correct nostrums, wasted hours and hours of time asking questions that plainly did not apply. This time that was wasted on irrelevant questions would have been far better spent on trying to find out why my friend was crippled with mysterious pain, when relevant questions about significant previous sports injuries, probably the primary cause of her pain, were apparently unasked.

The birth of my son was accompanied by a horrible medical error where an epidural injection was put in the wrong place and several years later no x-ray was performed on him as a toddler when my wife and I took him to hospital when he had a hard fall. When Laughing Boy had his fall I would have expected that a x-ray would have been routine just to check for damage, but the hospital’s policy was to just watch and wait and only to worry if he threw up or bled or was vaguely ‘not his normal self’. We couldn’t exactly get a second opinion as the NHS has a virtual monopoly on healthcare in the UK unless the patient is wealthy enough to afford private healthcare, which they have to pay for on top of the taxation that pays for the NHS. Luckily all was well with our son but it could easily have been otherwise.

General medicine such as hospital care and the General Practitioner services are often mediocre to awful, but specialist ‘Cinderella’ services such as Mental Health are even worse. I’ve heard horror stories about the NHS Mental Health system that would make Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest seem like a beacon of humanitarianism.

People I’ve known who have had the misfortune to have to use NHS mental health services have encountered mental health nurses in hospitals who have treated patients like they were nuisances who need to be drugged up in order to be quiet. One person told me about a mental health hospital in East London where nurses encouraged racism against white patients and, in the same hospital, where no attempt was made to keep alcohol away from wards treating those with alcoholism.

Someone close to me who suffered a traumatic event and is in my view drifting into PTSD is considering not bothering to attend the ‘gatekeeper’ appointment with their General Practitioner as they know that there will be an 18 week or more wait for them to get even an initial assessment appointment with a psychiatrist. This person feels that the GP will just palm them off with Citalopram and hope for the best whilst shoving them on a waiting list that may or may not result in treatment. Sadly I believe that they may well be correct in their assessment of how they will be treated as I’ve seen this happen to far too many other people in the past. With treatment like this is it any wonder that so many Britons facing a mental health crisis commit suicide while waiting for whatever treatment the NHS can be arsed to dish out to them?

People all too readily laud NHS staff and call them ‘angels’, however NHS staff are often anything but angelic. Lazy, incompetent staff abound in the NHS and it is all too common a sight to see nursing staff hanging round the nursing admin stations whilst patients suffer from hunger and dehydration. As for abilities to relate to patients I’ve seen loads of NHS staff who have all the customer service skills of a mugger. The attitude of far too many NHS staff to patients who would like to be treated like valued customers, and we should as after all we are paying for this service,is piss poor. NHS staff seem too often to have the attitude of ‘your treatment is ‘free’ so take it or leave it’. You would not tolerate the attitudes presented by NHS staff if they were serving up burgers and fries but we have to put up with this in the woefully misnamed ‘envy of the world’.

British taxpayers shell out £116 billion pounds per year (2015 figures) for the National Health Service and we get for that money a creaking, sclerotic, inefficient system that does not treat patients as individuals let alone as customers. We pay this enormous amount of money for a healthcare system that has not been copied by any other advanced nation on the planet, and one that seems to be as badly run as a Soviet era tractor factory.

I used to support the idea of an NHS but now, having experienced it and seen those close to me experience it, I now despise it with a passion. If the NHS was abolished tomorrow and replaced with some form of taxpayer funded personal healthcare budget that British subjects could spend as they chose and where they chose, I would celebrate. I would buy a bottle of champagne and dance around the grave of Aneurin Bevan, the Labour minister who in 1945 started the creation of this monstrosity called the National Health Service. I would celebrate the passing of this terrible organisation whilst at the same time grieving for all those who have been given perfunctory or piss poor treatment by it, treatment that has either crippled people or caused the loss of their lives.

The NHS needs to die and be replaced with something more suited to the 21^st century rather than something that was just about suitable for the middle of the 20^th. The death of the NHS cannot come soon enough for my liking, it’s an awful system and a terrible way of delivering healthcare.

I refuse to anymore worship at the church of the ‘holy’ National Health Service, it is nor a deity that deserves worship and I therefore dissent from such worship. I am an apostate from Britain’s national secular religion and I hope others join me in this apostasy. We need and deserve much better than we are getting from the National Health Service.