75 reasons for doing the NHS 1000 miles challenge

It is funny how you become attached to things. I still have the second guitar I ever owned. It is now 52 years old and still plays beautifully. My first guitar got smashed at my local church youth club, and I can remember vividly how distraught I was at the time. Last week I had a similar experience. My university laptop died. No other word for it. It wouldn’t charge, and just sat there silently, a useless grey plastic box. Over the week I went through all the classic Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief*. Now you might say, what is your problem, it’s not a child, sibling, parent or friend you have lost. It is a laptop.

That was the strange thing. My logical self clearly recognised this. Most of the important information on the computer was backed up on a separate hard drive. I could retrieve it all if I wanted to. Although the laptop wasn’t as old as my second guitar, (perhaps at most 7 years old) and was dented, dirty, and had a keyboard where the letters N and E often didn’t work, I was very attached to it. It is the laptop I use to write my blogs on, to send Twitter messages, to do Google searches and do online shopping with. And yes, I could do all of these thing on any machine. Indeed, I have an NHS laptop, a Blackpool Council laptop as well as my own personal iPads.

On Friday, I took the laptop to our local PC doctor. He was non judgemental when he looked at the state of the machine, just smiled and said, ‘let’s just take a look at it’. With that he whipped off the back of the laptop revealing its never before seen innards. ‘Hmm’ was all he said before poking at different parts, testing to see if there was any electric current to be found. ‘Hmm, I don’t know’ was his next comment. He disconnected the lead to the battery, counted to 10 before reconnecting it. 

Would you believe it the screen started to glow and within seconds the login page was showing. I simply didn’t believe it. The PC doctor wouldn’t take any money, as he felt he hadn’t actually done anything. I gave him some anyway, told him to have a drink on me that evening. I was beside myself with joy as I walked home.

And last Thursday, I came across someone else who was beside themselves with joy. I was visiting our finance department at the hospital. One of the colleagues I met was Lisa, an Associate Director of Finance. I had met her before at different meetings and on numerous occasions, but this was the first time on her turf; she was in her office. Lisa was very excited about being one of the people chosen to attend the NHS 75 years’ celebrations in Westminster Abbey last Wednesday. She had joined the great and the good (Rishi, Keir and Steve were also there) in celebrating the NHS. I liked what Amanda Pritchard, Chief Executive of NHS England, had to say about the NHS at the event: ‘We come together today, not to celebrate an idea, but to celebrate all those who have breathed life into it, who have made it mean something real to millions of people over three quarters of century, and who continue to give us hope for the future’.

I would have liked to have been there, but was content to see the service online. At the start of the service, the George Cross, awarded to the NHS in 2022, was processed to the High Altar by May Parson, the nurse who administered the first Covid-19 vaccine. She was accompanied by Kyle Dean-Curtis, St John’s Ambulance cadet of the year and Enid Richmond, who worked for the NHS when it was founded in 1948.  J and me chose to celebrate in a different way. We went for a seven-mile walk in a lovely part of Lancashire. We have been supporters of the #NHS1000miles initiative, since it was conceived back in 2017 and brought to life in 2018, the year the NHS was 70!

Antony Tiernan led on organising those 70th celebrations. This year he was seconded to NHS England from his day job with London Ambulance to help organise the NHS 75 celebrations. I think he did a great job! It was while he was organising the 70^th celebrations, and asking folk to come up with creative ways to celebrate, that #NHS1000miles was created by a small group of NHS folk who thought a great gift to give the NHS was for all of us to support each other in becoming more active. There is much evidence that keeping active is a brilliant idea for protecting people’s health and wellbeing. So in 2018, the #NHS1000miles community went live. It is such a simple, but clever idea. From January 1st, people pledge to either run, swim, cycle, walk, even spin (or a mixture of all these), and record their mileage each week. On Sunday evenings around 19.30, folk post what they have achieved during the week, with pictures usually of where they may have been or what they did. Each week’s mileage is added to the previous week’s, with the aim of trying to reach a thousand miles by the end of the year. One of the reasons I grieved for my laptop was that all those mileage recordings and pictures were sitting on its hard drive – which I have now moved to the ‘Cloud’!

And those NHS 75th celebrations? They happened against a backdrop of the Covid-19 legacy of large waiting lists; 8 months of industrial action; a shrinking number of people working in the NHS, and the perpetual problem of not enough funding. That said, it was wonderful to remind ourselves of where the NHS came from, what, collectively, it has achieved over the past 75 years and what, in the future, our NHS might look like. Like my guitar, and laptop, people are greatly attached to the NHS. More than ever, we need to find ways to protect it. If we don’t, it’s unlikely the NHS will still be here in another 75 years.

*Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, an American-Swiss psychiatrist, first highlighted 5 stages of grief in the 1960s. Since then, her approach has been adapted and extended to 7 stages. As of April 2022, prolonged grief, also known as complicated grief, is officially recognised as a mental health condition, and appears in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) — the guidebook used by healthcare professionals around the world.