There’s a burly, tattoo-heavy security guard on the door. Inside, it is rammed to the rafters. Occasional shrieks are coming from within.
No, this isn’t a fun-filled nightclub but one of the county’s accident and emergency (A&E) departments.
I’d like to say it was at midnight on a Friday or Saturday, but instead it’s around lunchtime on a Wednesday.
Inside the large, gloomy waiting area and every single seat is taken. I’m assuming the security guard is there to prevent any loutish behaviour but it might as well be for crowd management.
I’m not visiting just for the heady atmosphere, but merely the latest leg of a trek to get urgent medical treatment for an elderly relative.
We’d already endured a two-hour wait at a nearby urgent treatment centre (UTC) before being referred here.
Efforts to get assistance through their GP – a place where trying to get an urgent appointment seems to entirely rely on you needing one moments before the tiny window of opportunity at 8am to book over the phone opens before slamming shut minutes later – came to nothing, with them simply telling us to ring 111. Who, in turn, pointed us to a UTC. And so the trek around east Kent began.
I’ll not bore you with our family predicament, but it is only when you make a trip to a hospital that the full extent of the challenge facing the NHS is laid bare. It is a truly depressing experience.
Too few staff, too many patients would be the short and sharp way of describing it. And all playing out in rabbit warren-like buildings which look like they desperately need significant investment. Or simply pulling down and restructuring.
And money – or a lack of – is, of course, is what it all boils down to.
I’m not going to take a political stance here – we all vote the powers-that-be of various political colours in so we all have a responsibility to bear – but the reality is that in the current climate there’s probably not enough money in all of Whitehall to solve the problems our health service faces.
It is, quite clearly, underfunded.
It’s not, after all, like the NHS is a gift we are given by the government. We all pay for it through our taxes.
But all the political parties seem to be so petrified about hiking taxes to fund it properly that everyone has sworn off it.
As an electorate, we sometimes need to acknowledge that if we pay slightly higher taxes, there’s more money to go into the services we actually need and rely on. To keep with the medical terms, it’s a bitter pill to swallow for our personal budgets, but it does generate more money for things like healthcare.
There is no end in sight to this dilemma. So, while we wait for a politician to have the balls to stand up and say it straight, the NHS will offer a service which is not just fraying around the edges, but rotting away.
And, given the poisonous atmosphere around politics of all hues, even if someone did, the chances are they’d be so much criticism they’d U-turn within a few days.
Perhaps the key message is simply not to get old and never get ill.
