I've been waiting so long for an operation on the NHS that I could lose the use of my hand forever

Since Theresa May took power a year ago, millions of people have been denied access to treatment. More than four million people are currently waiting for surgery on the NHS – the highest number in a decade. I’m one sad and sore number in that statistic.

Cuts, pay freezes, sell-offs of key parts of our health service and chronic mismanagement by Tory politicians have pushed our National Health Service to breaking point.

Figures released by NHS England reveal the scale of the horror, pain and abandonment Tory austerity has inflicted on patients. They reveal the first ever breach of the operations waiting time target, show longer ambulance response times and ever-growing waits at A&E – the latter being an issue that Jeremy Hunt has been dithering over since the coalition.

I know first-hand what their cost-cutting has done to ordinary patients, who just want to get better and move forward with their treatment.

I’ve been waiting for an operation on my elbow for more than a year now. The longer I wait for the procedure, the more likely it is that I will never regain full function in my right hand.

I have turned up for surgery twice and faced two cancellations, and have now been taken off the waiting list altogether.

The reason I am given is that others’ needs are greater. Of course, other people’s operations are more urgent than mine, and many will be life-threatening if not conducted immediately. But where do you draw the line? Is constant pain and risk of life-long disability in your 20s not enough to mean you deserve treatment?

A lottery for operations is not how our NHS should function, not how it used to function and not how it has to function.

The NHS was founded as a universal service for all those in need. Under Jeremy Hunt’s misrule, it has become a degraded, downsized, fragmented service, bled dry of resources, chronically understaffed, picked apart and sold off to companies for private profit. This has resulted in a service for those who happen to live near a bigger hospital or people who are on death’s door, rather than healthcare provided to us all, from cradle to grave, as promised by its creators.

98.8 per cent of NHS funding comes from general taxation and national insurance contributions. Our tax contributions pay for the upkeep of the NHS – we deserve to get something back, instead of being forced to watch it be systematically dismantled.

If you want to survive under a Conservative government, don’t get sick. Last winter, the Red Cross had to declare a “humanitarian crisis” in Britain as beds filled up. The meagre additional funding offered at the election by the Government failed to even address this crisis, let alone deal with the erosion of health services since 2010, which has been felt in every corner of the country.

How many more kids will lie on stretchers in hospital corridors this winter? How many more people will be denied operations to mend simple, but life-altering, ailments and wounds? How many more people will die needlessly of treatable illnesses because the Government won’t fund their treatment?

The NHS is a national treasure and a healthy population is a necessity, not the drain on finances the Tories think it is. They've had a year to fix the mess that Theresa May's predecessor made of our hospitals, and instead the Conservatives have left the NHS struggling on life support.

It’s time to end the cuts and invest in a modern health service instead. Leave it another year, and it may be too late.