The NHS at 75: To a Tehran-born psychologist, health care is the greatest UK crown jewel

In this extract from a new book, Dr Masud Hoghughi tells of his dedication to the health service

Nurses representing Great Ormond Street Hospital, home to the Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children, take part in a homage to the NHS at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. GeShow more

I think the greatest jewel in the crown of Britain is the NHS, bar none. It is just about the most complex, enormous, personal organisation dealing with people as people.

You know their race doesn’t matter. We all look the same when we’re laid on the table.

I was born in an environment where there wasn’t an NHS. I came to one and I easily and gently slid into it. I became aware of the layer upon layer upon layer of complexity and benevolence.

Sheer goodwill. People staying long after the hours that they should have gone home, in order to look after the patient.

It’s done as a gift. It is a gift that we give the rest of our fellow human beings. Forget about the salaries. You can get the salary anywhere else. But it is all the things that aren’t part of the salary that you give to patients on a daily basis.

The NHS has all the complexity that a human being has. All the complexity that a society has. But then multiple other layers added to that. There’s nothing better for us.

There is a commitment that transcends the limits of the service which are always there. When I visit my sister in a stroke unit, I talk to other stroke patients in their late seventies, eighties, nineties.

I say, "Do you know where you are?"

They say, "I’m in hospital."

I say, "Are you paying for it?"

They have paid for it during their lifetime. I say to them, "Isn’t it magnificent that you don’t have to worry about how much all this is going to cost you because the rest of us pay for you to be here?"

They become tearful. I become tearful, because the NHS is an act of benevolence.

I think the health service commands a love, commands a sense of possessiveness, which transcends people’s political beliefs.

Every generation of workers in the NHS has a loyalty. A sense of a deep knowledge of the good that it does, and the hardness that it has to go through in order to deliver the goodness that it delivers.

It has become part of their identity. It is part of our national identity. We would fight for it to kingdom come.

The reason why nobody else has an NHS is because they can’t afford it. It is really an extraordinarily expensive kind of organisation to run. But it is, equally, the envy of the world.

It’s getting better because it’s getting more self-critical. People are getting less anxious about making mistakes and being ridiculed or held up.

I don’t mean that malpractice doesn’t go on. How could it not? Because it has over 700,000 encounters every day between a member of the public and a member of NHS.

Human beings aren’t perfect. Neither patients, nor the people who look after them. They’re not perfect. They make mistakes.

They sometimes commit evil because, you know, we don’t select people on the basis of whether they have evil in them, or not. We hope to God that the goodness of the NHS will convert them.

But we have a lot of payments to make to people who’ve received the wrong kind of care.

My granddaughter is doing brilliantly as the senior nurse in charge in the acute unit of the Sheffield Children’s Hospital, which involves a network of six hospitals in the UK, but also includes Northern Ireland, with helipads, etc, to whom the most extraordinary cases come from all over.

She’s knee-high to a grasshopper. You can see how much I adore her. She’s absolutely fierce about the protective care of children.

She says, "The notion of timetables goes out of the window. If you’ve got a child who needs care, the child needs care. Period. That’s all there is to it."

It’s not because of me. It’s because she’s picked up that baton. As a whole lot of other people have picked up that baton.

This is not just about the health service. It is about life. It’s about protecting life and the welfare of other people. Is there anything more important than that? I don’t think so.

* Born in 1938 in Tehran, Masud Hoghughi was sent as a teenager to finish his education in England and went on to be honorary professor of psychology at the University of Hull and director of Aycliffe Centre for Children, County Durham, a secure residential care home for young people admitted on a welfare basis.

* 'Our Stories: 75 Years of the NHS from the People who Built it, Lived it and Love it’, edited by Stephanie Snow (Welbeck, £16.99), is available in hardback now. Royalties go to NHS Charities Together.