Saving the NHS Is Not a Slogan. It’s a Relationship

Antonia Kenny
1 day ago
4 min read

Why doctors and patients working together might be the most radical idea we have left

By Antonia @Unremarkable Me Published: 6 January 2026

Scroll Instagram for long enough and you will see it.

Save the NHS. Protect the NHS. The NHS is broken. The NHS is being sold off.

Big fonts. Big feelings. Occasionally a crying nurse. Occasionally a furious patient. Often both, just not in the same frame.

Online, the NHS has become a kind of battleground cosplay. Everyone agrees something is wrong. Nobody agrees on who is to blame. The algorithm, like a bored Roman emperor, gestures for more conflict.

What gets lost in the noise is this. The NHS is not an idea. It is a place. A waiting room. A corridor at 3am. A clinician trying to explain something complicated in five minutes while already running late. A patient trying to decide which symptom to mention because there is never time for all of them.

Which is why people like Dr Julia Grace Patterson matter.

Julia is not a lifestyle activist who discovered the NHS via Canva. She is a doctor who trained and worked in the NHS for around a decade before stepping back from clinical practice to focus full-time on campaigning for the health service, its staff, and its patients. She is the Chief Executive of EveryDoctor, a doctor-led, non-profit campaigning organisation focused on protecting the NHS from privatisation and chronic underfunding.Source: https://everydoctor.org.uk Source: https://www.instagram.com/jujuliagrace/

EveryDoctor does the serious work. Research. Policy briefings. Mapping how services quietly slip into private hands while the public conversation stays distracted by surface-level fixes. Their investigations into outsourcing and political influence are not abstract warnings but documented realities, laid out clearly and uncomfortably.Source: https://privatisation.everydoctor.org.uk/

I should be clear about where I stand in this. I follow EveryDoctor, I read their work, and I have shared their content across my own social media platforms. Not because it is fashionable, but because doctors speaking up matters. We need clinicians who are willing to name what is happening inside the system, and we need to support them when they do. Just as patients rely on doctors to advocate for our care, doctors need patients to have their backs when telling the truth becomes professionally risky. Solidarity cannot be one directional if it is going to hold.

This is where a lot of NHS activism lives. Necessary. Rigorous. Often emotionally restrained, because decision-makers prefer their outrage delivered with references.

And yet.

There is another side to this story that rarely makes it into those rooms.

The side where patients live.

Not patients as a concept. Patients as bodies. As people who wake up, make tea, cancel plans, rehearse answers, and brace themselves for appointments they waited months for. People who learn to ration honesty because too much truth can make you inconvenient. People whose illnesses are complex, chronic, expensive, and very bad at fitting into neat pathways.

Julia talks about patients. She clearly cares about them. But her centre of gravity, understandably, is the system and the workforce. Harm appears in her work as risk, outcomes, delays, and fragmentation. EveryDoctor’s Doctors’ Manifesto for the NHS lays out priorities for restoring safe staffing, funding, and working conditions in ways that directly affect patient care.Source: https://everydoctor.org.uk/the-doctors-manifesto-for-the-nhs/

What appears less often is the interior experience of being ill inside that system.

That is not a failure. It is a division of labour.

Doctors and patients are not rival factions in a culture war. They are trapped allies inside the same failing structure, experiencing the damage from different angles. Doctors feel moral injury when they cannot give the care they were trained to provide. Patients feel erosion when care becomes conditional, rushed, or transactional.

Online discourse loves to pit those experiences against each other. Who has it worse. Who should be more grateful. Who is being unreasonable.

That framing is lazy, and it is dangerous.

Because the truth is this. Doctors are not the enemy of patients. Patients are not the burden breaking doctors. The enemy is a system that has been slowly hollowed out while everyone inside it was told to cope harder and complain less.

EveryDoctor explains how the house is being dismantled. Patients explain what it feels like to still be living inside it while the walls are quietly removed.

Together, those stories are far harder to ignore than either one alone.

This is where collaboration stops being a buzzword and starts being genuinely exciting.

Imagine policy backed not just by data, but by lived reality that refuses to be abstracted away. Imagine doctors and patients standing side by side rather than across a desk, saying the same thing in different languages. Imagine NHS reform conversations where compassion and competence are not treated as opposing forces.

Unremarkable Me has always lived in that space. Not as an institution, but as a witness.

It translates systems into human terms. It shows what a six-month delay actually costs. How fragmentation feels when you are the one carrying notes between departments. How humour becomes armour when dignity is under negotiation.

That is not in competition with organisations like EveryDoctor. It completes them.

Activism burns hot and fast. Algorithms reward outrage. But saving a public health system is slow work. It requires endurance, attention, and a willingness to sit with uncomfortable truths long after the trending topic has moved on.

If EveryDoctor is fighting the fire at policy level, patient storytelling tends the embers in people. Both are necessary if anything is going to survive the winter.

Saving the NHS will not come from a hashtag.

It will not come from a single campaign or a single voice.

It will come from refusing the false choice between evidence and emotion. From understanding that trust is not a luxury in healthcare but the infrastructure everything else rests on.

The NHS was never just a service.

It was a promise.

And promises only survive when the people on both sides of them decide to protect each other.