Self owes it all to the NHS

It is difficult to express what I feel about the NHS without sliding into the kind of populist sentimentality which ensures that it remains that most peculiar of national institutions, part shrine and part political football.

I suspect that many of you who are reading this will, like me, feel that you owe your life, as well as perhaps the lives of your loved ones, to the ministrations of NHS doctors, nurses and auxiliary workers; yet at the same time, the notion that the excellent care we've been given is a function of it being free at the point of need is hard to take. Surely, we reason, the fact that a medic is being paid through our taxes rather than our insurance can't make them heal us any better?

Well, I think it does. I think it is the democratic and egalitarian character of our NHS that makes it as good as it is. We may hear all sorts of doom and gloom about waiting lists, bureaucratic waste and even malpractice, but when the chips have gone down the wrong way it's the state-wielded stomach pump we invariably call for. One of my favourite healthcare facts is that all those posh mummies who check into private clinics to have their heirs groomed out of them, are nevertheless immediately rushed to the central London maternity hospitals when there's any sign of real trouble.

The private outfits may have the decor and the room service, but its Guys, St Tom's and the Chelsea and Westminster which have the best obstetricians in the world, with the finest equipment at their disposal.

Yes, I've waited inordinate periods of time in A&E departments, and yes, on occasion, I've suffered at the hands of a pompous consultant, a brusque junior doctor or a blithe nurse, but factoring in just how exhausted and hard-worked these people are, their behaviour was entirely understandable. Just think how rude the staff in shops can be, and then imagine what it would be like if they were about to cut you open, or deliver your child?

I said earlier that I owe my life to the NHS; strictly speaking I suppose private doctors could have dealt with the inguinal hernia I was born with, and which made it impossible for me to be fed - except through a tube - for the first three months of my life. But somehow I suspect the staff at the old Charing Cross Hospital in Villiers Street took a rather more robust approach to things. Certainly, the doctor who delivered my third child was well able to look after himself. "This is the baby doctor," the midwife explained to my exhausted wife and I. It was the 11th hour of the fourth day of labour and things weren't going that well at St Thomas'. "He looks far too young," I lamely quipped, but the fresh-faced young man paid me no mind, and I watched, awed, as he delivered my son, who was choked by the umbilical cord and not breathing. Impossibly deft fingers worked with such speed and conviction that it was as if some human Stradivarius was being tuned up so as to howl into life.

The next birth wasn't quite so traumatic until some minutes after the baby was delivered, when my wife began to haemorrhage severely. This time it was her life that hung in the balance, and once again with no flap, no fuss, I saw heroic medicine in action. When it was all over, the doctors and nurses simply acknowledged my thanks with calm dignity: this was what they did, because this was our health service, all of ours.

If I've seen births - and I have, four of them - then I've also seen death. My mother died in UCH, a bitter and typical death from cancer, at the tooyoung age of 65. At every step of the way the staff were open to my and my brothers' input, letting us down gently into the great pit of grief and anger that is the death of a loved one. When the last hours came, the rapport we had with the nursing staff was exact, as pain relief and other medication allowed for a merciful release from an intolerable life.

These are the dramatic high points of my gratitude to the NHS's staff, but in between them spreads valley after valley filled with a quiet kind of thankfulness. Thanks to the nurse who stitched me up in A&E at the Royal Free in Hampstead after I'd pulled some stupid stunt - aged 16 - trying to impress a girlfriend. Thanks to the calm Egyptian consultant at the John Radcliffe in Oxford, who, after examining the lump the size of a goose egg in my two-year-old firstborn's groin, calmly and with great deliberation, pushed it back in. My eyes popped in disbelief, but he knew what he was doing and minutes later the toddler, who'd been languishing all day, was running up and down the corridor laughing. For the consultant had correctly diagnosed an inguinal hernia just like the one I'd been born with, and simply pushed the rupture back in. Now that's what I call handson doctoring.

But most of all, thanks to all the long-suffering GPs and practice nurses who've dealt with a myriad of minor complaints suffered by my brood and I over the years. It may not be glamorous, it may not be spectacular, but the sheer blessed relief of knowing that you can turn up to the surgery and see someone who will provide concrete help and reassurance not nine times out of 10, but 99 out of 100, is a large part of what makes the quality of our lives here in Britain quite as good as it is.

Thank you - we appreciate it, and we understand also that taking the direct pecuniary motive out of that help is what makes it so intrinsically valuable.