Jayne Dowle: Who will heal the NHS as winter crisis looms?

Yet I’ve been there in A&E with a sick child when the queue has stretched out of the door into the rain. I’ve had to physically drag myself to the surgery in the February fog to beg for an appointment because the phone is constantly engaged. I’ve failed to trust the advice of the “emergency helpline” more than once, and ended up at the hospital door.

And I’ve walked away from more pharmacies than I can name wondering exactly who they dispense all those drugs behind the counter to. The reluctance of chemists to sell cough medicine never ceases to amaze. Is it just me they don’t like?

What’s the point of going to the chemist if all they do is advise you to see your own doctor? Especially when you can’t get to see one until a week next Tuesday?

Anyway. I digress. It’s certainly not just me who is worrying about these coming months. One expert, Bernadette Garrihy, of the College of Emergency Medicine, warns that this “may be our worst winter yet”. Severe weather, winter vomiting bugs and influenza, growing numbers of frail elderly people and everything else human life throws up, from children slipping on ice to daft idiots who can’t handle a hangover all put our health service under severe pressure.

And what do our political leaders do about it? They argue in the House of Commons like sixth-form boys locking horns at the debating society.

I know that David Cameron and Ed Miliband are probably at their best when trading verbal blows. They are both obviously intelligent men. Listening to them going at it reminds us that our political system may not be perfect, but it is certainly entertaining. It is hardly enlightening though, this parry and thrust, when something as serious as life and death is at stake.

And, safe in the cosy warmth of the Chamber, they seem as far removed from a hospital waiting room at two o’clock in the morning as it is possible to be. Mr Miliband accuses Mr Cameron of being “complacent” about A&E and “clueless” about what is actually happening in the NHS. Observers may be forgiven for asking when was the last time he did a night-shift on the frontline himself, but however... Mr Cameron responds with a load of figures which seem to suggest that 20,000 people have lost their jobs in the Health Service over the past few years, but chins up everyone, we’ve got more health visitors.

And what good does this verbal fencing do anyone? It gives the political sketch-writers something to be witty about and it gives the rest of us the jitters. Along the way, the startling facts are cast aside as if they mean nothing in human terms. The latest figures from NHS England tell us that the number of patients waiting up to 12 hours in A&E has almost doubled in two years.

More than 21 million patients a year visit the emergency department, a rise of 50 per cent in a decade. We can’t look at these figures in isolation. Better care in the community would help to prevent emergency visits. And countless individuals only end up in A&E because they can’t get to see their own doctor, if they are lucky enough to have one. When the Patients’ Association did a survey earlier this year, it found that more than 60 per cent of people had to wait longer than 48 hours to get a GP appointment.

When my friend, a generally hale and hearty chap, was laid low with a chronic ear infection this summer, he was told there wasn’t an appointment for him for a whole week. A whole week? And this was in the middle of August. If it was that bad in the summer, what’s it going to be like in January?

I’m sorry, but there is simply no excuse for this. Our political leaders get paid for arguing. Our dedicated doctors and nurses get paid for working long hours in extremely testing conditions. Yet the NHS is still failing to deliver the service we all deserve because it is not run properly.

And what do we deserve? An efficient system which offers GP appointments in a reasonable time-frame, safe and reliable out-of-hours care, and an emergency department which deals effectively with emergencies instead of existing mostly to mop up the mess from everywhere else.

For all the money and political capital spent, reform after reform seems to have had no effect at all. In fact, if the evidence is to be believed, it has made a chronic situation even worse. The Prime Minister once made a solemn promise that the NHS was safe in his hands. Tell that to someone sitting in A&E with suspected pneumonia this winter.