Thank you NHS


Today, during its most challenging year in its history, the NHS celebrates its 72nd birthday

We all have our own very special reasons to be thankful to the NHS.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s Strategic Head of Communications Jules Morton credits the NHS with saving the life of her one-year-old son, Sam, in January 2015.


Jules said: “It was a normal Friday evening. I’d taken Sam and his older sister Annabelle upstairs for a bath and hadn’t noticed that Sam was still holding a wooden spoon, which he’d been using to bang some pots and pans in the kitchen. The kids went to play in a bedroom while I ran the bath.

“I just remember hearing this piercing scream. I ran in and Sam was covered in blood – he’d fallen with the spoon in his mouth.” She rushed Sam to A&E at Dorchester hospital, where he was treated for a gash in his throat. He was discharged the following morning, with instructions from the consultant to bring him straight back in if anything changed.

Jules said: “Three days later I noticed that he wasn’t turning his head normally. Instead, he was moving his whole body to look around. We went back to hospital and purely by chance the consultant we had seen the previous Friday spotted us and came straight over. She insisted that he have an X-ray.

“The next thing I remember is being led into a private room by three people. They told me that they suspected he had an abscess and needed a scan. They were also worried that his airway might collapse and explained that they needed to scan him somewhere where he would have immediate access to specialist treatment if that was to happen.”

The family were blue-lighted to Southampton General Hospital, where Sam was taken straight to the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit. A scan revealed that fortunately fears of an abscess were unfounded, but Sam needed intensive treatment over the next four days for a nasty infection, being given antibiotics intravenously every four hours.

Jules said: “I’ll never be able to say thank you enough to the NHS. The quick actions of that consultant made all the difference and the story could have had a different ending if it wasn’t for her.

“I’ll never forget the kindness that was shown to us by the NHS staff. Sam was given special Peppa Pig pyjamas with his favourite character George on them and we were able to stay in the hospital’s Ronald McDonald hotel so that we could be close to him. They might seem like small things but they made a huge difference at an incredibly worrying time.”

#ThankYouTogether

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