Writing Call the Midwife made me think about how the NHS has changed – it’s unbearably sad

I’ve spent the last 12 years writing a series call the midwifeand the latter two are working on a film called Hallelujah. The first is about NHS workers in the 1960s, and the second, based on Alan Bennett’s brilliant play, is about NHS workers today.

similarity? Both are funny and both are sad. Both have paramedics caring for the sick, broken and vulnerable. Both have the problems and stress associated with working in an extended, imperfect system. A big difference? In the 1960s, the answer to the problems faced by the National Health Service was a desire for improvement. In 2023, the proposed solution seems to be to shut it down.

I’m not entirely sure how it got to this point. We have the NHS written in our bones as a nation and as individuals. We are born in it, we are vaccinated and, having reached a certain age, we are pumped up with free milk and vitamins, like children. We applauded him on the street, we brag to the Americans. But we are also quick to criticize and then condemn.

Always been a fan of Alan Bennett, I missed him. Hallelujah at the theater for my mother’s breastfeeding from terrible terminal cancer in Liverpool. But the producers sent me the script to read with an offer to adapt it for the big screen. On the pages I found everything I hoped for. There was life, humor, humanity, space to grow, and something that made my stomach hurt.

The downside was this: Hallelujah it is about the gap between a failed system and the heroic efforts of the people who maintain it. When my mother was dying, I saw it all. Every belated intervention, every error in the prescription, every ramshackle ward was made up for by a sympathetic family doctor, a resourceful paramedic or nurse who somehow found time to hold her hand.

There are nurses in my family and during Covid I saw the scarring that their PPE left on their beautiful faces. I saw her exhaustion, her determination, her determination to keep going. One of them, Josh, worked in the emergency room during the pandemic. Now he has such severe post-traumatic stress disorder that he had to quit the job he loves. He needs therapy. In GGD. And no one knows how long he will have to wait.

What broke Josh was a series of shifts where he was the sole nurse attending 26 parked ambulances, each carrying a sick patient. There was no room in the emergency room because there were no beds in the wards, and there were no beds in the wards because there was no care in the community. Everyone was stuck and every night was like a war.

Josh is writing a memoir and it’s brilliant. Blood on the floor, blood in his hair, psychopaths cry out to him for help. But I don’t want him to write a brilliant memoir about how breastfeeding nearly killed him. I want him to be there and do what he was born and trained for. I want him to save lives in a clean emergency room, I want him to relieve pain and hold hands with the terminally ill, so there won’t be a car in the hallway, so there won’t be dead people in the back of the ambulance. I want Josh to take care of it.

Hallelujah, which takes place in a beleaguered community hospital, about all of that, and I put as much love into the script as I could. That was my way of saying “thank you”, but I guess more is needed. On Friday, I spoke at an event for NHS Charities Together, the charity that looks after the National Health Service. He noted the role NHS staff have played during Covid and thanked them for all their work over the past 75 years. Wreaths of blue hearts were laid. We honored the memory of many who died, and I stood up and expressed my gratitude as clearly as possible.

It’s the least we have to do and the least they deserve.

Heidi Thomas is a screenwriter and playwright. Hallelujah in theaters March 17