Personal experience is the best basis for our support of the NHS

By Tim Nicholls/ @tim_nicholls

Among the papers last week was a piece on the Daily Mail website by Tom Utley, which called for more rationality and less emotion in the public debate over the NHS. And for once, with the Daily Mail, this was not a call for cool-tempered rationality actually designed to kick up a sandstorm. However, this display of a long-mislaid ability to talk sensibly should not be seen as talking sense.

While it may be true that some of the recent support for our Health Service by politicians appears disingenuous, it is still reflective of a broader philosophical agreement with the NHS. And this is based on what we feel, believe and have experienced.

To say, or Tweet, that you love the NHS does not mean that you think it is perfect: it means that you love what it stands for and what it provides. Anyone that has sat for hours in A&E would surely believe that it might all be done a little bit better sometimes (although, from the personal experience that I am so strongly advocating here, my longest wait in an A&E was in America, in one of their much-lauded private hospitals). That’s not what the attacks launched at the NHS, at home and abroad, were about though. Many were claims that it was ‘evil’.

I suppose I might be considered biased in all this talk of the NHS, as I (in a slightly different way to most others) have it to thank for my very existence: my parents are both doctors and met whilst working in our local NHS hospital. The fantastic treatment that I have received from the NHS during my thus-far short life, from being a baby admitted with bronchiolitis to being a reckless teen with a broken arm, has provided me with plenty of opportunities to thank the NHS for being there. So, when it came to it, I joined the many who managed to make Twitter crash: and do I now, in the cold light of day, feel foolish for such an impetuous outburst of support? Not in the least.

Our personal experiences are especially important now because they come in response to attacks on the very existence of the NHS, not just the perennial criticisms of management and waiting times. If the current furore were about waiting times then cold, hard data would be more appropriate, but the broader philosophical question of whether we want the NHS can only be answered by thinking more broadly and more philosophically: and for this we must rely on experience. Cool empiricism is not appropriate for most philosophical questions and certainly not this one.

Any claim that we should be keeping what we have experienced out of this debate is, therefore, quite false and this goes for politicians too, who will have shared many similar experiences to ours. To ignore experiences would be to ignore the true argument that emerged earlier this month.

This is not an argument on the fringes of the NHS; this goes to its core. Far from throwing off the shackles of passionate and personal debate, we should embrace our own experiences, as evidence of a desire to have a health service that is free at the point of use and available to all, regardless of race, age or income. Yes people might have different opinions on how the NHS should be structured, or whether it should exist at all. That is their prerogative, but just as they do not agree with the multitudes who showed their support on Twitter, nor should we have to agree with them. To ‘go personal’ is not irrational here, nor is it misplaced patriotism as some have suggested, it is actually the correct response to a philosophical question.