This NHS clap is not for its carers

At 5pm, we are being encouraged to head to our windows and doors to clap for the National Health Service on its 72nd birthday – the idea is that we’d be doing, once again, what we did in lockdown. Except we wouldn’t. The original gesture was to show thanks to the many healthcare staff (and a broader scope of key workers) who were putting their lives on the line to help others, treating our sick at the peak of the virus in the UK. These are brave people at the best of times, but especially so in the early months of the pandemic, when we were still in the dark as to how contagious it was, who was most likely to suffer from it, and just how deadly it would become. But this evening’s round of applause for the NHS isn’t like the others. So quickly we have diverted the attention from healthcare staff back to the monolithic institution that is the NHS: a structure and system that has been outdated for decades, failing its patients and staff alike.