THE NHS saved my baby’s life.

It saved it again when he had asthma and he couldn’t breathe. It saved his brother when the same thing happened to him. It’s just performed its 15th operation on my husband who would appear to have spent the best part of 50 years trying to destroy his own body with rugby.

Twice the NHS cured my sister of cancer and, last December, when she couldn’t be saved again, it was an NHS GP who was there to administer the drugs, hold her hand and visit our family during the dark, terrible night hours when all hope is lost.

So I won’t hear a word against it.

What I will hear a word against, however, is the ridiculous way it’s organised.

Frankly, you couldn’t have ended up with a more absurd arrangement than if you’d given the job to a lobotomized baboon.

I am the health correspondent for this newspaper. And even I don’t understand it.

On an almost weekly basis I discover yet another part of the NHS that I never knew existed.

These parts all have their own boards and administrative staff, offices, and communications executives and, it would appear, the kind of folk whose job it is to produce the most amazing and beautiful graphics. This is a giant shame because I’m guessing that outside of the inevitable PowerPoint presentation meetings almost no one at whom they are directed has ever even looked at them. Because they probably don’t know they exist. Or they are very old and don’t have access to the internet.

In the past four months, in addition to the entirely understandable Royal Bournemouth and Poole Hospital Trusts I have come across the existence of the Dorset Clinical Commissioning Group and something called DHUFT – the Dorset Healthcare University (what University it isn’t exactly clear) NHS Foundation Trust. I’ve unearthed an NHS England, NHS Digital, Public Health Dorset, Public Health England, NHS England South West and, just this week, something called a ‘Clinical Senate’. No? Me neither.

I’m not knocking the people within these outfits who are directly delivering patient care. Or those they genuinely need to support them. As I wrote in this newspaper earlier this week – the NHS does need managers. I don’t even quibble with the need to put health messages out there.

But in a time when we are busily trying to compress frontline, acute services in Dorset it does seem bizarre that we can afford to have bodies with websites telling us not to visit our family and friends in hospital in bad weather (wild horses wouldn’t have stopped me going to see my sister, by the way), and tweeting about the cold.

It seems odd that we are asking ‘Shall we close Poole’s A&E?’ instead of ‘Are all these health bodies really necessary?’

It seems weird to me that when there is a general acceptance throughout the land that we don’t have enough people to diagnose and adequately care for people with mental health issues, that the numbers of websites, sign-posting organisations, educational bodies and all the rest of it appear to be at an all-time high.

What’s the point of ‘signposting’ people to mental health assistance if, when they get through, there more or less is none? Isn’t that likely to make them feel even more despairing?

Or is it that, when it comes to the crunch, all these NHS bodies are simply not allowed to admit the awful truth? Which is that our frontline NHS is being – deliberately in my view – starved of the funds it needs by this government and not afforded the right to spend the money it does have where it sees fit? And the reason for this, I reckon, is so that more of us will just sigh and go private, leaving those who hate everything the NHS stands for to flag up its failings even more?

I live in Hampshire and we now have something called Orthopaedic Choices. My husband’s choice is always to get yet another cortisone injection in the latest part of his anatomy which has been mullered by rugby. In the olden days he’d go to his GP who would either do it himself, or pack the old man off to the correct consultant who’d do it for him. Ten minutes, in and out, job done.

Last year, however, he was swept up in a Kafkaesque round of appointments (around eight in all) including NHS visits to Salisbury’s private hospital (before being told our Clinical Commissioning Group couldn’t fund an op there), eventually getting an operation for carpel tunnel syndrome which took about 15 minutes. During this round of nonsense he’d had an MRI scan, numerous pointless physiotherapist appointments and driven round most of West Hampshire.

I don’t know why we have Orthopaedic Choices. I’m not sure why it’s even called that because, seemingly, you can’t choose not to be treated in their system. I’m still trying to find out who dreamed it up and why. What I am willing to bet, though, is that somewhere along the line it was brought in to ‘save money’ or ‘streamline’ services and this, in my opinion, is the kind of NHS service we should severely re-examine.

This year our beloved NHS will celebrate its 70th birthday. It has been the best investment any government ever made and has saved this country untold billions.

Far more than that, however, think about all the pain unsuffered, the anguish unexperienced, the misery never manifested – because an NHS doctor, or nurse, or dentist, or surgeon was able to do their job when it mattered, free at the point of need.

THAT is why our NHS exists and must continue to be funded. And only a lobotomized baboon could ever think otherwise.