United Kingdom

I've had epilepsy since I was a teenager and honestly I've had excellent treatment on the whole since then - with the odd minor bad experience which I put down to badly trained staff.

I consider myself very lucky to live in a country where the medications I have to take are free because I imagine if I lived in somewhere like America I'd be paying through the nose. My wife is also disabled so we're both very grateful given our situation.

I worked in the private sector for a number of years analysing hospital data, and now work directly for the NHS. Most people have an understanding that they're working for something that's more special than just any other office based job and that's really good to see.

Everyone wants it to work but as usual, its future is in the hands of the politicians and given recent history I'm not convinced they have the competency to turn things around without passing the buck and getting the private sector to do a lot of the work for them. Time will tell...

NHS saved the sight in my left eye following a horrendous viral infection about 20 years ago. It was the first time I remember feeling in absolute awe of a system that got me from GP to Consultant to urgent treatment and back to health with abolsutely nothing to pay; totally incredible.

I'm also old enough to remember family GPs, no telephone queues for an appointment at 8am and not being made to feel that you are nothing more than an incovenience.

I would vote for a truly competent government of any colour that could drag the NHS out of its grave and make it the thriving, efficient and well-resourced organisiation that we all deserve it to be.

That said, I'm hugely skeptical that the NHS is coming back from what appears to be a managed decline; even Tony Blair was in the news recently saying that he thinks there should be an expanded role for the private sector in healthcare - and I think that the New Labour government did really good things with the NHS; certainly from a point of use perspective.

Instead, what I now understand about private medical insurance is that they won't cover pre-existing conditions, so (and I'm sorry to say), my strong advice to all you healthy young people of the fediverse is to take-out some private health insurance now; when you don't need it, to ensure that you can get the prompt medical treatment you need later in life when shit starts going wrong.

Broken nose… unfortunate (and extremely painful) injury to private parts… allergies that would ruin everyday existence. The NHS solved the lot, getting life back on track with the minimum of fuss and I owe them nothing. Now I live in the US, and it’s an embarrassment how confusing, elitist and money-grabbing things are by comparison.

I wish people would wake up and start voting in line with their pride for the NHS. Anyone who votes Tory, in any election, for any borough, needs their head seeing too… and you definitely won’t get that on a Conservative-run NHS.

I wouldn’t be here without the care I was given by the wonderful folk of the NHS. Covid got me bad and I ended up in ICU for almost two weeks despite being double vaccinated.

Neither my wife nor my children would be here without the NHS as my wife would have died in labour with our first child. The NHS is one of the greatest things we have ever built, and it needs both a lot more investment as well as being run by qualified medical personnel and not used by every government as a political football.