The NHS is only human, like the rest of us – so let’s forgive it when it errs

When you have undergone intensive NHS treatment, it’s routine to feel grateful to the NHS staff who saved your life. I’m no different. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, some years ago, I had surgery several times, and also chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The sheer number of individual professionals I encountered was huge – maybe 100, over the years. It was the same for each of my parents when they were treated for cancer.

Not every single medical professional was perfect, though, just the vast majority. Occasionally someone would turn up who seemed insensitive, dismissive or maybe just a bit off. Likewise on other occasions, such as when I was in hospital having babies. Because one is vulnerable by definition at these times, relying so greatly on others, and because such treatment is so far from the norm, these encounters stand out.

There was the doctor sporting a kippa who insisted I should hold the cup of my bra over my remaining breast while he examined my new and suppurating mastectomy wound. The idea was to protect his modesty, not mine.

There was the nurse with the avid expression on her face who told me that I should dress my wound myself because that’s what I’d have to do when I went home. Then, after I’d started putting on the surgical gloves she held out on a tray for me, she added: “Oh, actually I could have done it, couldn’t I? Except you’ve started putting the gloves on now.”

There was the consultant who was so proud of his professional detachment that he told my father, immediately after telling him he had cancer, that he most probably had four months to live, (pinpoint accurate) with the same casual tone he might have used to point out a car door that wasn’t shut properly.

There was the midwife who had fag breaks. There were the radiographers who confirmed I did have breast cancer, then started chatting among themselves about whether their part-time colleague, Barry, should have his own trolley.

There was the ward sister so covered in piercings and tattoos she was mesmerising. And, of course, there were all those nurses who were walking solecisms because, as one warrior of self-righteousness or another often notes, they were overweight.

An enthusiast of market solutions might suggest that these “customer-service” aberrations were a dreadful thing. I can’t agree. Apart from the nurse with her hobby of getting patients to dress their own wounds – who, I admit, had the whiff of the sadist about her – all these moments of discomfort served mainly to emphasise how unusual was the failure to cultivate a wholly appropriate bedside manner.

The NHS is a broad church. Few people are turned away from treatment, and suggestions that more should be – smokers, drinkers, the obese – are generally resisted. But the sort of people who are employed by the NHS form a broad church too. Those who are gifted in their medical abilities but not social skills are tolerated. Those who don’t fit a corporate stereotype of what a medical profession should look like are tolerated. Those who, like most of us, know better how to preserve their health and fitness in theory than in practice are tolerated.

The bland conformity that rules in the corporate world of customer service is not rigorously pursued. And that’s a good thing.

As social enterprises go, the NHS is a pretty big one, maybe the biggest in the world. There’s always technocratic talk about its future – targets, efficiency, results, standards, expense. There’s always idealistic talk about its vision – equality, citizenship, the helping of the vulnerable, the saving of lives, the improving of lives, the humanity of not having to worry that medical bills will ever destroy you.

But the NHS has other, more subtle qualities. The hefty gravitational pull its very existence exerts – the sheer bulk of its social democratic influence – makes Britain a better place and its people better citizens. You can’t measure it, but it’s easy to observe.

Other, more self-conscious social enterprises strive hard to achieve diversity, understanding that the greater the breadth of perspectives a question can be addressed from, the closer to impartiality the answer you get will be. One interesting thing about the NHS, though, is how little it has had to strive.

When I was a child, there was some baffling brain-teaser – I can’t even remember how it went – to which the revelatory denouement was: “The doctor is a woman!” Also, a male nurse was such a rare thing that he would be pointedly called a male nurse. Medicine was a profession that was strictly divided by gender.

It would be an exaggeration to say that such divisions within the NHS have melted away completely – surgeons, for example, are still usually male. But I think it can safely be stated that the breakdown of tight professional gender divisions in the NHS was important not just in itself but in terms of the example and the first-hand experience it offered to patients and to the general population.

Likewise with racism. With such a broad range of ethnicities and nationalities working in the NHS, for a lot of people the choice has been between letting go of their prejudices and letting go of medical care. The most strident proponent of anti-immigration rhetoric would find it hard to survive a couple of days on an acute ward at a major teaching hospital – or any other ward at a teaching hospital, really.

Tolerance has become a bit of a weasel word. Bigged up as something marvellous – as in weasel phrases such as “Britain’s proud history of tolerance” – it rather implies that some kindly liberal is being terribly understanding about something that’s not quite acceptable, really. But the NHS is, among many other great things, a true model of tolerance and inclusivity, a place where people – staff and patients – have as much room as possible to be their different, sometimes imperfect selves. All human life is there, and that’s a wonderful thing.

Obviously, the most important thing about the NHS is the care it gives to us, the patients. While it isn’t always perfect, and sometimes lets us down, the NHS on the whole is, miraculously, rather good. We return the care the service offers to us by caring for it in return – very much. Long may that precious affection last.