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5th July 2013 

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Happy Birthday  
News and Comment from Roy Lilley

Today is the 65th Birthday of the NHS; over a million people will be at work in the most talked about, envied and successful health system in the world.

 

Over seventy percent of the work force is female.  Here are over 100 different volunteering roles in a hospital; meet and greet to hospital radio.  Volunteers, where would we be without them?

 

The customers?  Well:

 

*  Across the NHS more than 1.5 million patients and their families will be in contact every day.

*  Approximately 170,000 people (the same number who attended the Glastonbury music festival) go for an eyesight test each week.

*  Our NHS will help deliver around 16,000 babies at home. This is enough children to fill the Royal Albert Hall three times over.

*  Each month, 23 million people (more than three times the population of London) visit their GP surgery or practice nurse.

*  In a typical week, 1.4 million people will receive help in their home from the NHS.

*  Ambulance services will answer five, 999 calls every minute of every day. 

*  In a year District Nurses will call on the equivalent of the populations of Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta and Iceland - combined! 

*  Full-time GPs treat over 255 patients a week.

*  NHS chiropodists inspect more than 150,000 pairs of feet every week. That's about half the British Army.

 

And we have a lot to be proud of:

 

*  The oldest person in the world to have a hip replacement was a 101-year-old lady who was treated at Good Hope Hospital in the West Midlands. More than 90,000 hip replacement operations are carried out every year.

*  When 13-year-old Sylvia Diggery was admitted to a Manchester hospital with a liver condition in 1948, she became the first patient to be treated by the NHS.

*  Britain's first sextuplets were born to Sheila Thorn at Birmingham Maternity Hospital in 1968.

*  Louise Joy Brown, born in Oldham on July 25 1978, was the world's first test-tube baby.

*  The first heart transplant in the UK took place on May 3rd, 1968 at the National Heart Hospital in Marylebone, London. By December 2007, over 5,000 heart transplants had been carried out in the UK.

 

The upshot; men and women live about 12 years longer than they did before the creation of the NHS in 1948.

 

So, if you are reading this before you go to work, be proud and make it a great day.  If you are at work, thank you, make it a great day.  Whatever it is you do, wherever you do it, make it a once in 65 years great day.  Take a moment; raise a glass, a cuppa-builders and break open the Hobnobs, and toast the the people who fought to create the NHS and the ones who are fighting to keep it.

 

And, it's time to fess-up.  When the NHS had the money we didn't invest it to be more efficient.  Now we are going to have to do it without the money.  Waste, quality, efficiency, patient satisfaction, bureaucracy, access, demand, freedom to speak up and speak out, hopeless strategies, pointless reorganisations problems aplenty and only one way to fix them.  Only one person.  In your bit of the NHS it's you.  Promise me you'll try.  Like the NHS, I'm not getting any younger and I'm worried!

 

Happy Birthday and have a great weekend! 

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  happy birthday
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Nuffs at 65
Nuff's Birthday Book for the NHS.
65 views from 65 people on the NHS at 65.
Free download.  You MUST do this and dip into it.  It is really, really good.
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Only Good News Today!
 >>  The NHS at 65 - NHS Choices web-site.
>>  Physiotherapy - Dereham Hospital.
>>  Keeping in touch - with mother.
>>  LaLite invites you to celebrate - central London, register here.  Be quick.
>>  The cancer nurse - helped me cope.
>>  Coping - with mum's brain tumour.
>>  Daughter - in safe hands.
>>  The first baby born in the NHS - speaks about her fear for the future.
>>  Nuff's - NHS at 65 rejuvenate or retire.  Hobnob and cuppabuilders.  Watch this.  If you can't do it at work, copy the link and do it at home.
>>  Wales - celebrating 65 years.
>>  Nuneaton - celebrates.
>>  Trafford General - celebrates.
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Today's Larf
cartoon martin  
With Martin Shovel