IN our collection of family knick-knackery there’s a faded black and white photograph of a bunch of people sitting very formally on chairs on a stage.

One of them is my grandmother, a socialist stalwart who was the co-founder of the North West Labour Party and a committed Fabian. Another is one Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, the founder of the National Health Service, of whom millions of us have been and continue to be thankful.

Quite where and what the occasion was for this giant of a man to be sitting alongside my gran has been blurred in the generational telling, but it’s still a photograph that gives immense pride and in the way it’s been handed to me for custodianship I shall do the same with it and pass it on to my son. Which given that he’s a card-carrying member of the Labour Party is all to the good and will no doubt make him proud of his socialist principles too.

But given my experience of the NHS this past week I do wonder what Nye Bevan would make of his dream today, coming up to 66 years after it was realised. It's not that it was bad. Nor was it that it failed to meet our needs 'free at the point of delivery' as one of the founding guiding principles made clear it must do.

Indeed, we are fortunate enough to have a brilliant GP who knows her way round the system to the extent that when my Half Self collapsed a few days ago she managed to get him an urgent referral for outpatient tests within a week.

His condition wasn’t bad enough to merit a blue light journey to the nearest A&E department but it was worrying enough to give us sleepless nights and gentle pacing-the-floor anxiety. So getting an early appointment despite originally being told he’d have to wait until April made us truly thankful.

Like most people who've either needed NHS emergency care or witnessed it at close quarters through the experience of their stricken loved ones, I have nothing but unequivocal praise for the care and attention received by doctors and nursing staff at times of acute family distress and trauma.

And you only have to tune in to the likes of Channel 4’s sensitively and brilliantly made 24 Hours in A&E to see what medical staff manage to pull off on a life-saving basis day in, day out to be awed by their skill and compassion.

But on this occasion, last week’s visit to an outpatient clinic was truly, deeply demoralising. If we didn't feel fed up before we went in, we certainly did when we came out. Who, for example, chooses a waiting area colour scheme that consists of drab greeny-blue seascape lino, Dayglo blue plastic seats, dark blue skirting boards and door jambs, and pale blue and sicky cream walls?

The waiting area, in fact, wasn't really a waiting area at all but a corridor. It was just like waiting outside the headmaster’s study for repeatedly twanging ’laggy bands in class at the kid in front apart from the couple of patients loudly swapping notes about people who don't wash their hands when they go to the loo and graphically discussing the best way of cleaning unmentionables from lavatory bowls.

Hardly anything to do with how the NHS is run I know, but there was no escape into a corner.

Not in a narrow corridor where all and sundry can see all and sundry there wasn’t. That aside, having your blood pressure taken by an unsmiling member of staff who won’t look you in the eye, won’t engage, won't speak and looks as bored as someone watching that pale blue and cream paint dry does nothing to enhance your feeling of well-being.

Never mind that you might be nervous about what’s wrong with you, or are one of those people for whom the hospital experience is unfamiliar, clearly this particular health care assistant had undergone an empathy bypass which begs the question whether she was a suitable candidate for offering care to people in need.

Maybe she should have been cleaning those patients’ lavatories of their unmentionables instead.

And the doctor’s consulting room was a dreary, lethargic, can’t be bothered sort of place too. No cheery pictures on the walls.

No pictures at all, in fact. Just blank seen-better-days expanses of plaster with scuff marks as though people were too dispirited or too mean to make the effort.

It was all very sad sad because the majority of NHS staff who work in such an environment must get dispirited too.

Which wasn’t, if you think about, what Nye Bevan intended at all.