The NHS Report

By Tim Heydon

The Report by the Health Service Ombudsman Anne Abrahams which has revealed shocking instances of the gross lack of basic care for the elderly in NHS Hospitals has spurred a rash of heart –searching along the lines of ‘How, why, can this happen? What can we do to ensure that elderly people are given the care and respect they deserve?’ Etc.

Additional Training is Required? Not Really

The line coming out so far is that ‘additional training’ of Nursing Staff is required. But the reasons for the appalling third – world conditions to which our father and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers are so often condemned in state hospitals go far deeper than mere lack of ‘training.’ How much training do you need after all, to know that old, sick people must to be fed and kept clean? How much training is required for anyone to treat old, dependent people with compassion and respect?

The Decline in the Grip of Christianity

Chief among the causes for the collapse of caring standards is the decline of the grip of Christianity. When the elderly who now go to hospital at the end of their lives were young, Nursing was still thought of, not just as a profession as it increasingly now is, but also as a ‘calling.’ This is a word one almost never hears these days, but in the context of nursing (and medicine) it means a career to which one is drawn because one is a truly caring person and because one feels a Christian need to care for the sick. That sense of a religious duty of care seems to have faded away in nursing. The same remarks could be made of doctors.

The Drive to Radical Individualism and ‘Equality’

Then there is the decline in a sense of community (NationaI Identity). The National Health Service was set up by a nation always united by virtue of its racial, religious and cultural homogeneity, which had just won a huge war against its enemies who wanted to invade and take over their country. It was now more than ever united across the social classes and wanted to reward its people for their patriotism and sacrifice. That strong sense of community, of a national family looking after its own, including its parents and grandparents, has been undermined by the ongoing drive to a radical individualism whose effect is to alienate people from each other by breaking down those very same bonds of race culture and religion, justify the insidiously evil agenda of the imposition of a false ‘equality’ and encourage egotism and selfishness.

Immigrants Don’t Care

The malign effects of Radical Individualism and its evil partner, ‘equality' in breaking down the strong sense of community which made the NHS possible in the first place and which helped to give it its ethos of care in its early years have of course been spurred on in synergistic fashion by the importation of large numbers of foreigners into the country and into the NHS. These people who are in any case often underqualified by our standards cannot share the cultural and religious assumptions which underpinned the NHS and which are fading fast even among the indigenous population. Importantly, they can feel no great connection on human terms with the patients they are allocated.

Why should they? Elderly patients who in particular need attention are not the parents or grandparents of their national /racial family. So too many of these immigrants are even more likely than individualised indigenous staff simply not to care much emotionally and this lack of feeling is easily translated into a practical lack of care. For them, nursing is just a job for money with not much more emotional content or satisfactions than working in a factory or office and if they can shirk it, many of them will.

The Rejection of Authority

But there is yet another aspect of the cultural revolution which has helped to bring about the collapse in caring standards we are witnessing in the NHS. The rejection of authority which lay at the root of that revolution led to the disappearance of the Hospital Matron, a terrifying figure who was in overall control of nursing and the state of the wards in her Hospital. When she went (it was almost invariably a woman) her responsibilities were fractured in a way which worked against the patients’ interests. And the running of the hospitals has been handed over to tiers of management who are more interested in figures than in people.

The Cult of Youth

Part of the rejection of authority is the disappearance of respect for the old simply because they are old; because they have lived a life and seen and often suffered much. There is now little sense that the old have something to offer because the wisdom of their years. Hand in hand with the gradually loss of respect for life which is part and parcel of the decline of the Christian ethos, the old are increasingly seen as of less value and therefore of less concern than the young.

The More ‘Caring’ our ‘Society’ Thinks Itself, the Less Caring it actually Is

Fascinating, isn’t it, the way in which a society that fancies itself as morally superior, more ‘caring’ than ever before is in fact less and less so when it comes to the nitty gritty of actual hands-on care.

‘Care’ in the Leftist, Liberal sense is not personal; it is outsourced to the state so that ‘caring’ Leftists and Liberals can get on with their selfish egotisms with what remains of their consciences clear. But when those who are supposed to ‘care’ in the NHS also lack the motivations for nitty-gritty hands-on care, the results are as we see them in our hospitals as elsewhere in the State Apparatus.