The NHS may be ‘in crisis’, but it still works when you dial 999

For the first time in my life I had to call an ambulance, because my mother was suffering from chest pains. It was a fascinating episode: so much so that my mother, when she was feeling a little better, accused me of actually enjoying it. The reality of Monday morning in a south London A&E department — within 25 minutes of the 999 call she was in the recovery room at St George’s, Tooting — may lack the intensity of ER and offer no hint of the tangle of doomed doctor-nurse-paramedic relationships that afflicts Holby City, but it gives you plenty to think about.

Stories this week have suggested that NHS blunders cause 2,000 needless deaths annually, and that the service is heading for crisis over its new £6 billion computer system (one of the suppliers, iSoft, is in deep trouble) to add to a continuing crisis of funding; St George’s itself was £24 million in the red last year. But at ground level — to the observer hanging around A&E for a day — it is reassuringly robust. It is also surprisingly homely: the 999 operator addressed me as ‘my love’ and the big, brisk Afro-Caribbean woman driving the ambulance called me ‘sweetheart’. A nurse took the trouble to move a couple of male patients out of an alcove of the medical assessment ward because, she said, ‘My mum wouldn’t like being surrounded by blokes in here either.’ The only features that deserved criticism were the baffling pay-as-you-go bedside phone and television provided by Patientline plc of Slough — in which I shall not rush to buy shares — and the stewed food. ‘Vile,’ my mother declared, feeling a little better still and dispatching me to a nearby kiosk for fresh fruit and sandwiches.

But if it felt homely, it also felt foreign.