My trip to A&E with a broken toe left me overwhelmed with pride and gratitude for the NHS

The Whittington Hospital A&E "showed the NHS at its best"
PA Archive/PA Images
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Recently I broke my toe. After months of being careful to avoid the slightest injury, I ended up sitting in A&E with one of my little toes sticking out at a crazy angle.

There wasn’t even a fun party story to tell the triage nurse.

I had tripped up over the leg of a chair, after half a single gin and tonic.

An X-ray at the Whittington Hospital in Archway showed it had fractured clean in two places, and even the doctor said “ouch, that must have hurt” — at which point I knew I wasn’t being a whinge-bag for turning up.

What struck me was that despite having woken up that morning in excruciating pain and unable to walk, I genuinely considered not going to A&E.

After months of daily death tolls, I was so scared of contracting the virus while visiting the epicentre of Covid-19 in our minds — a major London hospital — that the reality I was unable to move had become a sideshow.

I am clearly not alone. Latest figures released by NHS England show A&E attendances were down from 2.2 million in May 2019 to 1.3 million in May this year — a drop of 42 per cent.

But my four-hour trip to A&E left me feeling not only overwhelmed with pride and gratitude for our NHS but more confident about a post-lockdown world.

Almost everyone was wearing a mask (and those who didn’t were frowned at slightly).

It was the cleanest A&E I had ever seen, and suspected Covid patients were sent to a different area.

The wait was boring — but when called to the quiet, ordered urgent treatment centre I was seen by a doctor, given an X-ray, splinted and booted within 45 minutes.

The focus was back on what the NHS does best — fixing people who need it quickly, calmly and with no frills.

And sitting in the X-ray room it dawned on me that the small scene symbolised the best of London, the NHS and the society we have created. The one we must fight for in this “new normal”.

There was me, the offspring of Jewish immigrants.

The radiographer, a swift and expert black woman, with her colleague — a young Muslim woman who came into the room winding a beautiful hijab around her head.

The reassuring female doctor was from eastern Europe and the male nurse from the Philippines. And we were all Londoners, all together.

That morning I had read saddening headlines about fascist protesters, but I left feeling reassured about the “new normal”.

The London I witnessed in that A&E was as resilient, diverse, and successful as ever.

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