MY mum spent a few days in hospital recently.

She’d suffered a stroke and after giving us a fright is now well on the way to recovery.

I’ve not had cause to visit the hospital much since my children were born but like everybody else I take an interest in our National Health Service.

I worry about its future in this time of austerity even given the Government’s pledge to pour money into it.

Talk of turning the NHS into a business to raise standards, despite David Cameron’s insistence he has no plans to privatise our health service, chills me.

So it was interesting to observe the overworked but dedicated hospital staff while I was visiting my mum.

I noticed a real bond between workers, from the porters to the nurses and junior doctors right up to the consultants.

Our hospitals might be creaking under the strain but in the dedication department (I think it’s next to A&E) there’s a healthy colour in the cheeks.

Many people wouldn’t notice the implicit communication between staff, the jokey banter, the almost invisible bond of comradeship – a cheeky smile here, a raised eyebrow there – pervading our hospital. But it was there and I saw it and I was impressed and reassured.

I saw a porter pushing a trolley along a corridor. He stopped to peer down an adjoining passageway and whistled the opening bars to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. A colleague whistled the same little tune back to him. It was a brilliant moment of camaraderie, the porters like Native American braves sending smoke signals. I felt all the better for witnessing it.

Nurses on my mum’s ward handed out jokes and comic insults with the pills and medicine. They hummed half-recognisable chart hits as they swished privacy curtains around beds.

They prescribed encouragement and optimism to patients who were feeling down and brought cups of tea and sympathy to concerned families perching anxiously on the edge of plastic chairs.

Talk to people who work in the NHS and when they’re not talking about the pressure the system is under they tell you about the wonderful kinship they share with fellow workers.

I once talked to a former US serviceman during a holiday in America around the time of Obamacare. The former soldier was crippled with pain in his legs and was in desperate need of surgery but he couldn’t afford the medical insurance to pay for it.

“You are very lucky in the UK,” he said, staring into the distance, in the calm Japanese-style garden where we were sitting.

“You don’t know how lucky. Don’t ever take your health service for granted.”

I don’t.