I have some sympathy for the NHS.

Not only do they have to deal with the overwhelming task of treating Covid Patients, the pressure of which will not subside until the summer, but they are forced to take health risks to do so. When Covid demands are finally reduced, they will have to spend years dealing with the backlog of treatments pushed back by the pandemic. When those backlogs are finally laid bare, they will be subject to further criticism.

I also have sympathy - for the hard-working individuals involved. It is the organisation that seems to fail. It happens when organisations get too large, top-heavy, choked and wasteful. The individuals get conditioned and stressed from inside the organisation also. They are unable - and maybe have lost the will - to think for themselves.

So we can criticise the NHS, but we should not loose compassion for the employees that are bound up in it.

Not one person in my area came out clapping.. 😆 😡

Why don't they clap for us, for having paid for them through enormous amounts of tax (some of us have) paid over the years?

Or how about they just do their job to the best of their ability and lobby the govt about their grievances rather than holding the rest of the country to ransom.

Among all the tears-inducing amounts of money spent during this panic, I have not noticed any major investment to make sure health services are better prepared?

Totally agree! They poured billions down the drain. Consultants, test and trace, 'moonshot' testing, the NHS app, Nightingales, crap PPE... now the main reason we're in lockdown is to stop the NHS from being overwhelmed. It's not even about the virus being dangerous anymore, it's about the NHS being overwhelmed by covid patients. Why didn't a massive NHS recruitment drive start in March? Why were medical students, student nurses, retired medics not encouraged to begin work? I know you can't train a medical professional instantly but they should have began to put the infrastructure in place so that at least in the longer term the NHS is properly staffed. Imagine what they could have done with all that money they wasted.

NHS is always above criticism. Its a cult.
Which is why it'll never ever improve.

Agreed. We are not told that we must clap for the National Grid for example, although it keeps the power flowing to hospitals, care homes, schools, factories, television studios, water pumping stations, gas compressor stations etc. The vast majority of us can easily survive for several months without the NHS. However a total power outage of 24 hours would cripple the country, yet it never happens because the engineers, technicians and fitters, many of whom work on standby to deal with any faults, ensure that it doesn't. Utility workers are far more important than health service workers, but the latter are so used to being worshipped that they don't realise it.