A fan of the NHS, not a knocker
Mike George was a writer, socialist and a fervent believer in social and economic justice. He set up and wrote this independent blog after becoming ill in Spring 2020. Mike’s aim was to raise the profile of patient perspectives and experiences in health and social care services. The intention was to present challenges to medics, health service managers and others – not confrontation for its own sake but as a critical friend.
After finally being diagnosed in December 2021 with BCG-Osis (a form of TB) following immunotherapy treatment in 2019, Mike died in London on 3 June 2022 at the Royal Free Hospital. Despite the stressful rollercoaster of his own experiences, Mike was determined to illuminate many important issues that affect patient care and people’s physical and mental health but deserve far greater attention from the medical profession and politicians.
Mike supported the NHS and good social care service. His overarching intention was to campaign for better treatment and better services for all. As he wrote:
What’s missing from so much policy-making, management plans and indeed medical training, is people’s lived experiences as patients and service users. What it’s actually like to be an in-patient in a hospital at the receiving end of tests, treatment and nursing care. What it is like when you are scared, not told much, expected to eat poor quality food, and maybe have basic needs ignored. What it’s like when you go home but can’t access the services you need to make a proper recovery.
Too often, people’s actual experiences at the receiving end of services don’t figure half as much as they should in policy-making or service design and provision. The aim of this blog was to raise questions and challenges for health or social care professionals and managers.
Because a lot of lip service gets paid to patient participation but it’s about time that patients’ and service users’ views were given far more weight.
This matters!
From Mike’s own experiences and wider work, he highlighted issues in the Posts that are likely to affect many other people such as: how hospitals can decondition people and impede recovery; the flawed nature of current approaches to rehabilitation; and the urgent need for well-designed aids and equipment.
As he wrote, there are so many other issues that need highlighting such as:
- Medical training: can nursing and medical training be improved so that staff know how to communicate properly with patients and their families?
- The training, support and supervision of healthcare assistants
- Ageism and stereotypes: can we rid hospitals of ‘geriatric’ wards, where staff expectations of patients’ capabilities can be very low?
- Holistic post-hospital services: why don’t we have ‘post-Covid’ type clinics and services for anyone who is experiencing long term effects of illness?
Mike made no apologies for featuring in this blog brief personal accounts of his own experiences: he had a mystery – but all too real – illness from 2020 to 2022. It was both complicated and serious, surprising and worrying, and it took an awful lot of effort and concentration on his part to try to get better.
It was these experiences that finally prompted him to write this blog; previously he had been a researcher and features writer on health and social care but, as he wrote, this time it was personal …
For more about why Mike wrote this blog, see his post; and about his very varied career and inspirational contributions to society, see Guardian.
Finally, the content on this blog is not intended to be used for any patient participation exercise being carried out by official health and social care sector organisations, including commercial companies.