Heroes Never Die, Right?

Heroes are self-sufficient, brave, ask for nothing in return and need no support. Yet we in the NHS did need support, we wanted and needed proper personal protective equipment (PPE) so we can be safe, not brave.  

Labelling us as heroes helps conceal failings and shifts focus to our heroism. Bringing the nation together to clap for carers every Thursday to show you support us might be uniting us as a country, but claps much like ‘thoughts and prayers’ don’t save lives. It has been said that heroes never die, but we NHS heroes are. 

What lightens our hearts are stories and videos of people cheering for the NHS heroes. Something the whole nation can get behind, uniting us in the war against COVID-19. It struck me as a strikingly similar to war-like propaganda. 

During World War I, propaganda was used to encourage, and shame, young men and women to serve their country. I am not criticising anyone serving in our armed forces. I want to highlight how this heady mix of glory, heroism, sense of nationalism and British exceptionalism is enough to get people to sign up to dangerous situations without stopping to consider if it is safe to do so. 

Posters such as this were commonplace, all part of the governments clever propaganda campaign to shame people to fight for them. When that wasn’t enough, The Order of the White Feather was started in August 1914 by Admiral Charles Fitzgerald to further shame people into signing up. 

There is a draw to enter a vocation which brings with it glory, particularly for students and young people, but it’s important not to dive head-first into a dangerous situation. During this time many healthcare students asked to sign up as healthcare assistants (HCAs) to help their ‘comrades in arms’ and become part of the workforce early. Final year medical students had their exams and registration pushed forward to get more ‘troops on the ground’. I too felt increased pressure and a sense of ‘duty’ to increase my work hours as a paramedic, but having colleagues get ill and die made me consider the reality of the situation with inadequate PPE and my own mortality.  

In emergency response, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem particularly where going into a dangerous situation ill-equipped can be fatal. A fireman entering a burning building without any safety equipment only adds to the workload of their colleagues and likely the death toll. As such I ask you, if you chose to reduce your hours or stay at home to protect yourself because the risk of death was real, would you? An NHS hero not working, how shameful I hear some of you say.  

Getting more staff on the front lines was a driving factor during the pandemic, the NHS is understaffed as it is. However, our safety was at best a secondary consideration. With many of our NHS colleagues dying as a result I was struck by the similarity to findings in the Chilcot report. During the Iraq war a lack of PPE for defusing IEDs resulted in many soldiers on the front lines dying unnecessarily. Interesting how history repeats itself. 

No one deserves to die for the promise or belief of being immortalised as a hero, and to add insult to injury, our lives are apparently worth a £60,000 pay-out if we do die from COVID. Thank you Matt Hancock. I’m sure a pay-out equivalent to two-three years’ salary for some staff is great comfort to our families. If this money is available to be paid out, why wasn’t it used before to provide proper guidance, PPE and prepare for the pandemic? 

During this pandemic, the fundamental role of the NHS has not changed; providing healthcare to the UK populous that is free at the point of access. What has changed was how we manage our usual daily demands with huge volumes of new work coming through our doors, especially in intensive care, emergency and pre-hospital medicine. With the media storm, a spotlight was thrust upon us and our work was publicly elevated to sainthood. The NHS wasn’t created during this pandemic. It has been helping the public and saving lives for over seventy years. It’s amazing how quickly people have forgotten about the strategic dismantling of health and social care services, privatisation and refusal to increase pay in such a critical sector, especially when so many people clap and call us heroes. Will those who now clap loudest for the NHS chose to vote Conservative again?  

What will happen when this is over? Will the government give us the pay rises we have been asking for since 2010? Will the unnecessary A&E visits start again because people feel they can? Will frontline staff get support and proper justice when we are assaulted, spat at and verbally abused week in, week out?  

The sad fact is, heroes do die, and giving us ‘NHS heroes’ a memorial after the fact and a £60,000 pay-out does not absolve the people responsible for their failings and gross negligence of their duties to protect the health service and its staff, for all of us. 

As history seems to use glory to gloss over the true horror of war, we must not do the same with this pandemic. People must be held to account.  

I am not an NHS hero; I am an NHS worker.  

Matt Whitehouse