On the 5th July this year the NHS will be 75 years old, a platinum celebration. Many of you reading this will work in the NHS. After all, the NHS is well known as one of the largest non-military employers in the world. My daughter and my sister both work there. The NHS was founded in 1948 during Clement Attlee’s Premiership, under the guidance of Health Secretary Ney Bevan. The idea was a pre-war one, but the pressures of fighting World War II and the energetic release afterwards provided the impetus to create the service that we have today. The idea behind the NHS is simple enough, healthcare should be universally available to all and free at the point of need, regardless of your own personal wealth. Health, after all is a great leveller. It doesn’t matter who you are and what you own, you can be just as ill as anyone else. Though I do appreciate that, the poorer you are the more susceptible you are to certain illnesses.
Today’s NHS comes in for much praise and criticism. Such a large organisation employing so many people will often struggle to meet everyone’s expectations every time. There is probably room for improvement, there always is. If you do work in the NHS or have recently received services, maybe you know what some of those improvements need to be. But on the whole, it seems to me that the NHS is doing a good job. As a country we spend a comparable amount of annual GDP on healthcare as do France and Germany. Our system is superior to what is on offer in the USA, and that’s not just my opinion. A 2017 comparative study of the US system with those of 10 other developed countries across 72 indicators in the five domains of – Care Process, Access, Administrative Efficiency, Equity, and Health Care Outcomes, found the US system to be last or near last in all of these except Care Process. Overall, the US system is not universal, is more expensive, and produces poorer health outcomes. More than that, the study concluded that the UK, Australia and Netherlands were the top-ranked countries. I understand that the study is over 5 years old, but nevertheless that’s a pretty good endorsement for our system and the people who work in it.
When teaching NLP and Coaching I always say that if it isn’t broken, then don’t fix it. This is true, and I think we can still improve our system of healthcare. Now this isn’t based on a scientific study, it’s just my opinion. But I think that we can all help to improve the system by taking more responsibility for our own health. I am sure that most of us could drink less alcohol, eat less sugary foods, and exercise more often as a start. And as a society we need to remove the barriers which prevent people from doing this. One major barrier is our mental health. Think about your mental and emotional capacity as a cup. When we are stressed or emotional some of our available mental and emotional capacity gets used up. Then if some other challenge comes along, we cannot cope so well with it and our cup overflows. This is when we will notice and when other people will too. Releasing negative emotions, like anger, sadness, fear, hurt, and guilt from the past frees up more space in our cups. And if we let go of limiting beliefs about ourselves too, we can make our cups bigger. All of these things you can do with NLP, Time Line Therapy™, Hypnosis, and Coaching. In fact, the NHS in the East Midlands sends veterans to the military charity that I am the Lead Trainer for to do just this. If we all take more responsibility for our mental and physical health then we can help the NHS to evolve whilst still staying universal, free, and effective.
What the NHS project has shown is that a competitive market is not the only way to produce a good system. Perhaps when we realise just how universal we all are, then we can engineer more social systems that align with that idea too.
“The purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.” Ney Bevan
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