Angie, a woman with multiple chronic health issues including ME and an autoimmune thyroid condition, is preparing to leave the English Midlands for Bulgaria. Holiday there, she says, has been transformative – a strong sense of community and fresh mountain air form part of the pull. But she also finds the Bulgarian healthcare system more responsive than the NHS. “You have to pay a small fee to see a doctor, but then you see one quickly,” Angie says. While she is “very glad” the free-at-point-of-use NHS exists, she believes it is failing to deliver. “People aren’t getting a service – particularly with chronic health issues – that actually makes a difference to their health outcomes or quality of life,” she says. “Once you’re diagnosed, that’s it, you’re left to your own devices. I’ve had to spend a fortune on private healthcare because I couldn’t get any improvements within the NHS.”
Angie has become one of a growing number of Britons living with ongoing poor health. More working‑age adults are reporting long‑term health conditions: 36% said they had at least one in early 2023, up from 31% in the same period of 2019. A 2025 study from the National Voices charity found 37% of people with a long‑term health condition did not feel supported by the NHS to manage their physical health, compared with 16% of those with no long‑term conditions.
“Healthy life expectancy falls in UK as NHS struggles; polio survivor dies aged 78 after iron lung fails.”
Healthy life expectancy – the years a person can expect to live in good health – has fallen in the UK in recent years, while it has increased in most other wealthy countries. While life expectancy has stagnated, in more than 90% of areas, healthy life expectancy has dropped below the state pension age. Britons now live about a quarter of their lives in poor health. Across the country, healthy life expectancy in 2022‑2024 was 60.7 years for men and 60.9 years for women. The decline has been steepest in the most deprived areas.
Meanwhile, a stark reminder of an earlier health crisis: one of the last polio survivors to live inside an iron lung has died at the age of 78 after the machine became too old to repair. Martha Ann Lillard died on June 26 in Shawnee, Oklahoma, after spending more than 70 years inside the 1940s device. She was diagnosed with polio on her fifth birthday in 1953. “I woke up, and it was sunny outside, and I started to sit up, and my neck was killing me. I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow,” she told KFOR last month. She fell unconscious four days later and was unable to breathe or move. “They usually didn’t like to put children in because they fought it, but I didn’t,” she said. Two years later, a vaccine was created, which eradicated polio. At her sickest, Lillard required 23 hours a day in the lung; she used her one free hour to rehabilitate her paralyzed limbs. She was eventually able to live a relatively normal life, needing only about nine hours a day until she contracted Covid-19 twice and shingles. In her final months, she needed the lung 24 hours a day. The machine began to break down, and parts from the 1940s were impossible to replace. Her sister, Cindy McVey, said: “Some of the parts are from the 1940s, and they’re hard to locate. We have a spare motor, but we don’t have anyone to put it back in if we needed it.”