The NHS can only be fixed with adequate social care support - Christa Ackroyd

Believe me, they might not be life or death but those pesky little stones are damn painful. Within 24 hours my body decided to come out in sympathy and bless me with the double whammy of shingles. A bad case of shingles.

I was – and still am – in agony. So forgive me if my tone is a little sharp this week. I am not in the mood for soft soaping, as my granny used to say.

To begin with I was a little ashamed to tell people my pained expression was due to the large band of shingles across my ribcage, back and front. After all, isn’t shingles supposed to be a old person’s ailment?

Step up Justin Bieber to restore my ageing pride and make my condition bang on trend. Bieber has a syndrome caused by shingles in his ear that has led to him cancelling his tour. So it could have been worse – that’s if I had a tour to cancel.

Nor have I any complaints about my treatment here and in Croatia. My doctor prescribed the anti-virals while still abroad and even arranged the required medication to be waiting when I landed home. Here the system falls down. She wanted me to have a CT just in case but advised it would take her too long to secure one and suggested I present myself at my local A&E.

And therein lies the problem with the health service.

A&E was packed with people like me who should not really have been there. Many of us were neither an accident nor emergency. I felt guilty even turning up but was quickly assured I had done the right thing.

Tests completed within four hours. Sent home with stronger medication. All done and dusted. I would live, was the conclusion. But should I have been there at all?

Why, if the doctors needed an emergency scan, could they not book one (as it happens my appointment has come through for three weeks). And why did it take five phone calls to even get a phone appointment with my doctor? The answer, I am afraid, lies with the scale of the task.

In Croatia, on a little island off the mainland, the GP opened the medical centre at midnight to give a suspected diagnosis and painkilling injections. Her advice was to get to the hospital, which I did.

I arrived there via ambulance quickly and was scanned, treated and diagnosed in two hours. But I will not compare the two systems. Croatia’s health service serves just over four million people. Ours serves 65-million plus. The lovely doctor in Croatia has fewer than 1,000 patients. The average GP practice in the UK has more than 9,000, so comparison is pointless.

That evening spent in a Yorkshire A&E department made me even more convinced the issue lies not with GPs, the hospitals or the staff.

They were lovely and having to cope with a growing sense of resentment about waiting times from a jam-packed A&E, all displayed the patience of saints.

The issue is in social care. So many people I saw were elderly while others appeared to be suffering mental-health issues.

Patiently and with extreme kindness we were seen and treated. But what to do then seemed to be the issue. As I waited for my tests, carers from the outside arrived to try and pick up the pieces.

Overworked, underpaid and often undervalued, they perform a thankless task but are crucial if the health service is to run smoothly. And there are not enough of them. And that is the biggest problem in the NHS.

I hate the term bed blockers because it puts the onus on the patient, as though the fact they are there is somehow their fault. But too often it appears to be true that thousands of patients could be discharged sooner if adequate social care support was in place.

And that’s not me saying that after one visit to A&E. Three years ago Age UK published a report that suggested in a two-and-a-half-year period delayed discharges cost the NHS £587m – or £27,000 each and every hour. Lost bed days, where patients were well enough to be discharged but could not because of lack of support, was a staggering 2.5 million days.

And that is not good for the health of the patient nor the health of the NHS.

This week the NHS Chief Executive Amanda Pritchard said the current issue in the health service, including an unacceptable 12-hour wait for emergency care, meant the next two years could be worse than the pandemic.

She added that this directly led to delayed ambulance response times as they waited to unload patients and also noted it was “difficult to see social care capacity being significantly expanded before winter”. In other words if the Government doesn’t step up its commitment to social care outside the hospital setting they will do nothing to tackle waiting times and bed shortages.

I have nothing but praise for how I was treated at Calderdale Royal Infirmary. I don’t like the “tell us what’s wrong and the doctor will phone you back” system adopted by some GP services, especially when you are telling a receptionist not a medic. To me that is doubling up on the doctor’s workload.

But I got in and was treated free of charge. And that is a blessing. I just don’t believe it was necessary to add to the burden of an overstretched A&E to do so.

Sajid Javid said this week there is no more money for the NHS. That is not what they are asking for. What he needs to do is find some more for social care and let the hospitals do what they do best – treat then release those who seek their help. Because, my goodness, we would be in a mess without them.