THEY say if you have your health, you have your wealth and it’s true. I should know because a few years ago I faced some serious health issues affecting my kidneys, but thanks to the care I received through the National Health Service things have improved substantially.
Yet there was another dimension - I started to take more personal responsibility for the state of my health by controlling my diet and taking exercise.
Don’t get me wrong. I am no gym bunny and I am not downing some juiced-up cabbage leaf mixed with sheep yogurt every morning.
It’s simply eating and drinking less (sometimes) and walking a few extra steps every day. I still struggle eating my five a day unless you count chocolate, which is from the cocoa leaf, which is a plant and, therefore, technically in my world, it’s a vegetable.
My main aim in all of this is not to see the doctor more than once a year - even if they do call me in for check-ups every few months.
But it’s clear many others develop what some may regard as a social addiction to doctors’ surgeries, because some 28,000 people in Northern Ireland see a family doctor or practice nurse every day.
The figures were provided in a report called ‘One Voice - Time for Change’ produced by the NI Confederation for Health and Social Care. It’s a staggering figure, because if you exclude the weekends that’s over half a million people a month.
No doubt many are genuinely in need of medical assistance, but with those kind of figures it’s clear that many others are not.
The primary care system just can’t cope with these pressures. The NHS is brilliant when it works, but it does fail too many people.
Some of that fault, however, does not lie with the bogeyman administrators or, indeed, the minister for health, but with people making unreasonable demands on the health service’s points of access - whether it be accident & emergency waiting rooms or GP surgeries.
There appears to be a culture amongst modern parents of running to casualty departments with their children with all manner of minor ailments that their parents or, indeed, grandparents would have patched up and cured at home.
All of which takes us to the health minister, Simon Hamilton. By his own admission and experience of the NHS, which he uses to manage his Crohn’s disease, he clearly values the service.
The health ministry is the poisoned chalice of government. Former health minister, Michael McGimpsey, was unfairly lambasted for political reasons by the DUP when he held the post, but the DUP found it was a different story when they held the department.
Like a bar stool football critic who knows more than a manager, every party health spokesperson believes they know how to run the NHS better than the minister.
In Simon Hamilton I believe that this is a minister who genuinely cares about transforming the system so that it can survive the pressures put on it.
Health spending now accounts for 50 per cent of the entire Northern Ireland budget, but NHS problems will not be served by money alone.
In the boom days of the Celtic Tiger, Mary Harney, one of the most talented government ministers in Dublin, threw money at the Irish health service to no avail. So too did successive Labour ministers in the UK and even the present Tory government has actually increased health spending.
There needs to be a wholesale rethink about attitudes to the NHS. Minister Hamilton is starting to open up that debate.
He has invited all parties to consider how to responsibly tackle the pressures on the health service without making political capital out of it. That’s a big ask.
The debate around the need for 10 acute hospitals in Northern Ireland is a toxic hot potato for politicians.
Too hot for some, but the reality is that you can’t reduce the number of acute hospitals at the moment without tackling the deficit in roads infrastructure. People always fear the unknown, but what they do know at the moment is that physical access is a major issue.
What Northern Ireland needs is a health minister who is prepared to see the job of reform through. Hamilton seems to be that man.
With the elections looming it’s difficult to know who will hold the portfolio next, but the last thing we need is another minister with yet another plan.
Let’s complete the one we have first.
