Last week, Professor Lord Darzi published his shocking independent report on the state of the NHS in England. He warned that the NHS is in a “critical condition” after a decade of austerity, a protracted lack of capital investment and the impact of Covid. In addition, many healthcare staff are disillusioned, burnt out and still traumatized from the pandemic, whilst our society is becoming sicker, and demand is growing faster than it could be met.
But the NHS already spends an enormous amount of public money. This yr its budget is an eye fixed watering £165 billion and Keir Starmer has made clear that more funding is not going to simply be poured in without reform. He has identified the importance of going digital, moving more care out of hospitals into local communities, and specializing in prevention of poor health in addition to treatment. In the words of the King’s Fund think tank, “the duty is just not simply to prop the NHS back up. It is to create a recent approach to health and care on this country.”
In the UK we take pride in a system that’s taxpayer funded, free at the purpose of use and based on need fairly than ability to pay. The NHS is alleged to be there for everybody, and there may be an actual desire for it to be pulled back to its feet. But the challenges we face severely test our ability to balance our duty to take care of others with responsible stewardship of the nation’s resources, on this case our taxes.
How might we view these challenges through a Christian lens? Christians have often been distinctive of their approaches. In Roman times they were noticed because they cared for the sick and dying from other communities, not only their very own. And more recently, it was Christians who began the hospice movement to supply palliative take care of those nearing the top of their lives.
Our deep desire ought to be to be sure that everyone – healthcare staff in addition to patients – is treated with deep compassion, personal attention and the dignity that comes of being made within the image of God. Every single individual – incredibly, unchangeably – worthwhile beyond our comprehension.
This signifies that we also have to tackle ‘sticky’ issues akin to social care, which successive governments have deemed too difficult to handle, but which mean that increasingly more persons are struggling to afford or access the services they should live with long-term illnesses akin to dementia.
But healthcare is just not nearly treating the sick. In the words of theologian Jürgen Moltmann, good health is about ensuring people have “the strength to be human”.
Human value is commonly talked about in economic terms: ensuring that individuals are well enough to work and be ‘productive’ members of society. The Office for National Statistics estimates that just about 3 million people of working age are ‘economically inactive’ resulting from long-term physical or mental sickness.
Lord Darzi has rightly identified that the nation’s health is affected by wider social and economic problems akin to poverty, poor nutrition, family breakdown, insecurity in employment and housing. The report says: “Many of the social determinants of health … have moved within the flawed direction over the past 15 years with the result that the NHS has faced rising demand for healthcare from a society in distress.”
The Beveridge Report of 1942 that was instrumental within the creation of Britain’s welfare state laid out five giants that stalked the land: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness. Though the language is now outdated, the issues will not be.
So when we predict in regards to the NHS we must also consider how we tackle these other aspects, which can all be covered by different governmental departments and a few by none.
And then there’s that gut-wrenching phrase, “a society in distress”. It will be hard to read these government reports without despairing for our nation. Grim statistics and bar charts trending towards misery soon change into an excessive amount of to bear.
There is a deep spiritual reality to the brokenness around us which we must take to God in prayer. Like the persistent widow to the judge in Jesus’ parable in Luke 18, or indeed like among the passionate lobbyists who fill my inbox, we must always not back down, nor be disheartened in our prayers.
Countless persons are feeling hopeless, lonely, and hungry. We know that the Church has a significant role to play in providing counter-culturally selfless love in community, but in addition in pointing them to the enjoyment and hope that’s present in the Gospel.
Tim Farron has been the Member of Parliament for Westmorland and Lonsdale since 2005, and served because the Leader of the Liberal Democrat Party from 2015 to 2017. Tim can be the host of Premier’s A Mucky Business’ podcast, which unpacks the murky world of politics and encourages believers across the UK to have interaction prayerfully. He is the writer of A Mucky Business: Why Christians should get entangled in politics.
