Retired GP Dr Ruth Chambers, a Visiting Professor at University of Staffordshire and also Honorary Professor at Keele University, has drawn on her personal experiences to write a book explaining the evolution of the UK’s National Health Service over the past 50 years.
Here, she gives an insight into her career, explains why she wrote Our NHS and what she hopes people will take from it.
“I wrote this book to provide ‘ordinary’ people with a wide range of ‘stories’ relaying the changes (for good or bad) in the delivery of NHS care over the last 50 years and nowadays.
NHS staff and members of the public to whom I’ve talked, shared lots of insights and stories about the NHS, relaying their experiences of delivering or receiving healthcare. For decades, GPs were the ‘gatekeepers’ of the NHS, providing continual healthcare for their registered patients 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
When a patient rang for help and I as their GP would then decide if we could sort the problem, or I’d arrange a hospital review or admission, or send the patient into A&E. GPs worked without any specific contractual agreement that defined their clinical responsibilities for many decades, with their clinical care based on trust.
This changed drastically with government-led changes in 2004, though general practice teams were still expected to provide continuing care from the start to the end of patient pathways.
I settled as a GP in Stone, and then Tunstall, as I wanted to help to reverse the scale of health inequalities across Staffordshire; life expectancy in some areas like Cannock and Stoke-on-Trent is ten years less than in more affluent areas across the county.
This is mainly explained by the poor lifestyle habits of those living in our deprived areas where there are so many more people with diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer (I could go on!)…and these trigger decades of ill health, needing constant NHS care.
Other more affluent areas in the UK have patients who are more likely to self-care, and adopt healthy lifestyle habits (and thus be less likely to develop diabetes and heart disease), able to pay for private healthcare, and more likely to have a smartphone and digital skills to utilise digital access to their records.
My end chapter emphasises that a sustainable NHS is about the whole picture – not just about repairing the‘holes’, and I list 77 ways to save and sustain the NHS if we want to continue to provide a comprehensive service across the UK, which is free of charge, based on people’s clinical needs, and universally available to everyone.
We must kick start the intensive care and underpinning workforce needed for the NHS to survive, as matters of urgency!
This focus on improving population health underpins the critical need to support a healthy workforce for all businesses, with staff less likely to take sick leave or retire early.”
- Our NHS is priced at £9.99 and is available here. All profits from the book will be donated to the Dougie Mac charity based in Stoke-on-Trent.
