On reading the news that the NHS is planning to launch a scheme next year which will reward people for taking exercise – to be precise, walking for 30 minutes a day – I’m afraid I made a very disrespectful noise.
The shortcomings of the National Health Service were exposed in recent headlines about the simple business of ensuring as many women as possible aren’t traumatised by having a so called “natural” birth imposed on them, with the higher mortality rate that has historically gone with it, making this nanny-knows-best babyfication of the adult population seem particularly inappropriate.
The “marathon a month” challenge aims to have people walking 26 miles in that time; the ubiquitous “smart phone” or “smart watch” will apparently be used to offer up yet more information to the authorities about the correctness of our behaviour.
Defenders of the scheme will doubtless point out that prevention is better than cure, and that encouraging people to take exercise now will save tax-payers a fortune in the future. But this prudence seems highly prejudiced and cheese-paring. The NHS wastes a huge amount of money, on everything from a vast bureaucracy (the world’s largest quango, NHS England, is widely believed to have contributed to the longest waiting times, lowest patient satisfaction and most expensive NHS in history) to the disposal of masses of single-use equipment, creating 156,000 tonnes of waste produced by the NHS every year in England alone.
