The hottest political football of the day has to be the NHS, or ‘Our NHS, wonder of the world’. [Edited to add: It was, until we had ‘Cartoons to die for’.]

Indeed, the NHS did rank ‘top’, as the ‘best in the world’ – so long as you, as the media gleefully did, refer to a survey from the private US think tank ‘Commonwealth Fund’ which merely compared 11 different health systems in developed countries; should you refer to the World Health Organisation, which includes responses from all countries in the world, you will meet a different picture:

In its most recent major study of global healthcare systems, the World Health Organisation ranked France as best in the world. And France has the fewest healthcare-preventable deaths among 16 OECD nations. According to US think tank the Commonwealth Fund, France performed best on mortality amenable to healthcare. This is the best measure we have of how effective a health system is at saving lives, and judges the number of premature deaths that should not occur with effective and timely care. Britain had the second highest number of these deaths per 100,000 people, beating only the US.

Still, what do facts matter when there are headlines to be written? Perhaps they meant that the NHS is the ‘best in the world’ to be employed by – and were not concerning themselves with patient outcomes?

When the NHS was launched in 1948, it had a budget of £437 million (roughly £9 billion at today’s value). For 2012/13, it was around £108.9 billion.

There are a thumping 1,203,519 people employed by the NHS – only half of whom are clinically qualified – a mere 370,327 are nurses. Back in 1974, nurses went on strike for the first time, and not just on strike, but engaged in an ongoing media campaign to raise the profile of the ‘angels of the NHS‘ that eventually joined forces with the burgeoning ‘feminist’ movement, seeking a higher profile for women, more concessions for women regarding child care, and higher wages.

Since those days, and the success of that media campaign, we have been groomed to instantly think of ‘those poor nurses’ whenever we hear of ‘Jeremy Hunt to veto 1% pay rise for NHS workers‘. We don’t waste a second’s thought as to whether the 600,000 people variously wandering around at snails speed in ‘Our NHS’, cutting the grass, calculating the profit on the car parking arrangements, or moving boxes of files from one end of the hospital to the other, are actually worth their wages, or will even result in grandpa’s early death if they don’t get a pay rise – we are transfixed by the perils implicit to ‘those poor nurses’.

That PR campaign continues today – back in September we heard that the ‘NHS was calling for volunteers’ to go to Sierra Leone to ‘fight the Ebola virus’. The media gorged itself on pictures of pretty young western nurses who had volunteered to enter the deadly contaminated districts and risk their lives nursing people with Ebola.

Let me be the first to say that I wouldn’t volunteer to go to Sierra Leone to man a ticket desk at the airport, nor would I volunteer to wipe old ladies bottoms in an English cottage hospital – so don’t waste your breath telling me that I wouldn’t do what they are doing – of course I wouldn’t.

What I am interested in is the PR angle that the media are spinning – not least because one of those highly trained, expensively protected behind high tech gear, nurses, is currently seriously ill with an Ebola that we are told is ‘almost impossible’ for a normally dressed English person sitting next to a victim on an aeroplane to catch. Why is it so important that we ‘buy’ this image of the little English rose venturing selflessly into darkest Africa?

“It’s been phenomenal, it’s very moving. Dame Sally Davies, [chief medical officer for England] was at one of our events for volunteers this week and it was clear she was very moved by the people coming forward,” Redmond said.

While there remains clearly a risk of staff catching Ebola, “healthcare professionals are trained at managing risk, respect their colleagues and are most comfortable following protocols and they trust themselves and their colleagues to do that”.

In my search for some genuine figures behind the media onslaught, I have come up with some interesting facts.

First – we are sending ‘up to 800’ highly trained healthcare professionals, all of whom hold full time contracts with the NHS. Indeed, UK-Med which is co-ordinating the NHS response, will only accept you if you do! No part time staff, no one on ‘gardening leave’, no one on a temporary contract, no one ‘between jobs’ or coming out of retirement – they only want 800 of the NHS’s finest.

Those personnel will continue to receive their full time salary from the NHS – or rather the taxpayer – including all pension benefits etc. , which is only right and proper; they will be treated in exactly the same way as the highly trained nurses who remain behind and, er, treat Ebola patients in the UK – who won’t be lauded in the media as ‘selfless volunteers’ with its connotations of unpaid labour.

Professor Tony Redmond, Head of UK-Med said:

The actions of these selfless volunteers in going and the actions of their colleagues and managers to release them and cover for their duties is testimony if ever there was to the altruism that lies at the core of the NHS. I am very proud of them all”.

The work they would have been doing in the UK will be done on the basis of ‘backfill’ – an interesting word which means their colleagues will be covering for them, via overtime, and the Department for International Development will cover the cost of this. Who are the selfless colleagues doing extra overtime?

The hospital and community health service statistics provide a country-by-country breakdown that puts the issue in context. In September 2013, 567 Sierra Leonean health staff were working in the NHS, of which 347 were professionally qualified clinical staff.

{On the other hand} – Sierra Leone, as my hon. Friend the Member for York Central said, has about 136 doctors and just over 1,000 nurses for 6 million people.

How many of the eligible professionally qualified 347 Sierra Leonean clinical staff are amongst our 800 ‘selfless volunteers’ – if anyone knows the answer to that one, I would dearly love to hear from them.

What about the conditions these nurses are working in? They are flying out to the brand new 62 bed British built treatment centre in Kerry Town – only 50 of whose beds are for Sierra Leone – the other 12 beds are reserved in case any of the nurses fall sick. How did that treatment centre get to be there?

Courtesy of the Royal Engineers, who were just doing their job, arriving in this deadly area without the benefit of specialist training or two week induction courses, or even specialist clothing – and told to get on with the job of building a hospital from the ground up. They don’t get any laurels from the media.

Much was made of RFA Argus being sent out to the region with its ‘state of the art’ medical centre on board – but it seems the personnel of 22 Field Hospital Unit, would have to make do with the allegedly non-existent and unsatisfactory local hospitals should any of them be unfortunate enough to catch Ebola.

Although many might think the 100 bed medical complex will be used for treating Ebola patients, this is not the case, the medical facilities will only be used for injuries and non Ebola illness. If any personnel contract Ebola they will be treated ashore.

Just doing their job see, not ‘selfless volunteers’.

Last but not least, we should at least mention those other selfless souls, though like the army, they are scarcely volunteers – the patients queuing up to be treated in an NHS which is ‘understaffed, under pressure, and under funded’.

The British Medical Association (BMA) warned there was “unprecedented levels of pressure” on the health service and the Royal College of Nursing said the system was in “crisis,” blaming chronic underfunding and staffing shortages.

Seems to me that the only people suffering deprivation for no reward, surely the definition of ‘selfless volunteers’, are the patients left behind in the UK, wondering why the ‘envy of the world’ isn’t quite living up to their expectations whilst they languish on a trolley outside A & E.

Tagged as: #NHS, Ebola, Royal Engineers