The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has landed on an arresting image to illustrate the waiting-list crisis in its field. If all 760,000 women waiting for NHS gynaecological appointments were to stand in a line, the queue would go from London to Exeter. It’s great for visualisation, but it also rams home what a criminal waste of human energy this represents – the awful pressing interminability. I couldn’t face the queue for Kew Gardens now, let alone if I were in constant pain.
Given this, plus a crisis in maternity care – nearly half of all services last year were marked as inadequate or in need of improvement – you could make a solid case that it is women who suffer most when the health service is underfunded. But I have to mention the guy in my local car-hire place. I rent a car only to go to one place (Ramsgate, thank you for asking) and I go only in alternate school holidays, so a bit less than once a quarter. Every time I have been this year, he has been back on the waiting list for an operation that got cancelled at the last minute. The system is not working for anyone.
Likewise, you could look at the number of people paying for private treatment – turnover in the private sector went from £1.3bn to £4.9bn under the coalition and then Tory governments – and say that waiting lists are harder on people with low incomes. They have fewer options, live with pain for longer and have to take more time off work. But, again, this is not a prejudice of the system; this is a broken system intensifying existing inequality, because that is what broken systems do.
Socially, the waiting-list crisis gives us the perfect negative image of what the NHS was built for. Its stated aim was to “promote good health in all citizens”, but in reality it created a pocket of absolute equality, blind to every existing disadvantage. And as much as we didn’t mention this fiefdom of socialism bang in the middle of a marketised life, it spawned greater equality everywhere. I would love to see a health secretary fighting for that first and mentioning “efficiency” in a footnote.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
