It ain't necessarily so

We Brits, especially those of us who voted Remain in the EU Referendum, tend to think that public services are always better in Europe, but the reality can be more nuanced.

News reaching us in the Canary Islands today focuses on a major demonstration in the Spanish capital, Madrid, yesterday when 250,000 protesters took to the streets. This was the third such rally against what marchers see as the systematic dismantling of the public healthcare service in order to bolster the private sector. Sound familiar? The factor that links Madrileños' concerns with those in the UK regarding the NHS is that it is happening under a right-wing government, in this instance the Madrid regional administration of the right-wing Partido Popular (People’s Party) (PP), led by its regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso.

Things are little better in the Canaries where an item on local television channel, Mirame TV's current affairs and investigative journalism programme, Canarias Al Día (The Canaries Today), revealed the shocking logjam of admissions to the Islands' hospitals. Scenes of beds lining corridors were all-too familiar to a British viewer. And yet these things are relative. The Spanish health care system in general is seen as performing better than the NHS. Where problems arise, as in Madrid and the Canaries, they usually tend to be due to political meddling or incompetence, just as in the UK. A member of my Canarian family is a hospital doctor in the UK who has grave concerns about the ability of the NHS to cope much longer. She herself is pregnant and has chosen to spend her maternity leave in Spain and have the delivery there. After that, she will return to the UK to continue her work for the NHS but the likelihood of her extending her contract is remote - the constant stress is just proving too much.

With national healthcare systems consuming such vast, and growing, proportions of government expenditure, and being such a sensitive political issue, it is small wonder that politicians want to remain firmly in control. But the politicisation of health and social care is getting in the way of effiency and hampering those medical professionals managing the system and striving to make it work for the benefit of the public. The NHS has been through a number of politically motivated reorganisations and reforms over the years but, while one's heart sinks at the prospect, Labour's pledge to look again at NHS delivery if it gains power is probably the unavoidable option. 

I knew Labour's Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, when he was a young local councillor. He is an accomplished young man who has himself experienced potentially life-threatening blockages in NHS delivery while awaiting cancer treatment. I expect him to make a capable Health Secretary but don't envy him the daunting task of sorting out the mess he will inherit. It will be tantamount to setting up the NHS from scratch in 1948, in a post-War economy.

We did it then, we can do it again.

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