Good and Bad
My few personal experiences are when I was young. I managed to take a particularly bad tumble onto a girder aged about six and break my jaw. It took two weeks for the docs to figure it out and x-ray it. I still have a badass lump where it knit wrong, but well enough the ortho decided to just leave it rather than re-break it to fix it. I now have a very lopsided smile (which is apparently adorable), and a possibility of braces soon to set my teeth properly.

Another time which was much better was getting my astigmatism sorted in primary which went really well :)

But my favourite example is my dad. He's a paranoid schizophrenic with co-morbid depression, and despite him fucking up a lot, his support team and psychiatrists have pretty much always been there for him, whether in the hospital or at his home, or setting up community stuff for him, and getting him placements in trials (clozapine ftw) and generally helping out as much as they possibly can to keep him as healthy and active as he can handle.
They're a bunch of saints who deserve nothing but praise, and I've got nothing but good to say about the services here. Sometimes they're spread a little thin, but damn they make up for it. They've helped with family stuff too, getting mum and later me into a carer program so we can take time off, and talk to people in similar situations. They're the reason I got into psychology and why I'm on the uni course I am, so I guess they've helped me out a lot there as well.

All in all, go NHS! While they're not always as perfect, they're as good as they possibly can be with the sometimes limited resources they have :)
(Fleximus Rex briefly gave up lurking on, Sun 14 Mar 2010, 4:01, Reply)