LAST Thursday evening, just like the week before, tens of thousands of people across Britain, from their front doors, windows and balconies, gave NHS and care workers a massive round of applause. 

It was a nationwide celebration of the efforts being made, and the individual risks being taken, to treat the rapidly growing number of people suffering with, and dying from, Covid-19. 

It was also a very public and uncharacteristic display of appreciation — “everyone was very touched,” said my mum, a practice nurse, when she got home the following day — for a health service whose workers need all the support they can get.

But, as I stood at my bedroom window and listened to the street’s eerie silence momentarily give way to raucous cheer, I couldn’t help but wonder: will this affection continue to resonate in hospital wards and surgery waiting rooms over the coming weeks and months? 

Will a greater level of sympathy transcend familiar grievances over waiting times, missing prescriptions, delayed referrals and appointment scarcity?

I’d love to think so. Many people will, I’m sure, be wonderfully understanding (in my experience, often those whose need is greatest). 

But, to invoke a weary cliche, as well as bringing out the best in us, a crisis can also reveal the worst: consider the abuse supermarket workers have been receiving over all those empty shelves. 

The sad reality is that NHS staff — and front-line staff in particular — can expect some serious hostility as this pandemic sweeps the land.

If you work in the NHS, the amount of abuse you receive is, on the whole, inversely proportional to your status in the clinical hierarchy: the more senior you are, the more shielded you are. 

If you’re behind the front desk — dealing with the queue, answering the phones, booking appointments, finding (or not finding) prescriptions and bearing bad news — you take the lion’s share.

I speak from experience: I was a receptionist in a GP surgery for three years and was shouted at, sworn at or threatened pretty much on a daily basis — without a global pandemic beginning in earnest. 

If you think surgeries won’t be affected, think again: I dread to think what lies in store as an overstretched health service struggles to treat those with Covid-19, and those without it too. 

As hospitals swiftly reach capacity and after 1.5 million “at risk” citizens were told to stay at home for 12 weeks, GP surgeries will be swamped with calls and visits from patients desperate for answers, solutions and treatment. 

They’ll want to stock up on medication, speak to a doctor immediately about their symptoms (or something else) and will even — despite clear instructions to the contrary — pay their surgery a visit and demand to be seen about a persistent cough and fever. 

Receptionists will bear the brunt of these endless calls and angry encounters while barely earning a living wage. 

Dealing with this influx will require an urgency often thought to be callous when denying non-essential appointments or refusing medication requests. After all, in a crisis most people won’t be getting what they want.

When I was behind the front desk a number of patients seemed to think I had extraordinary power: to prescribe medication, create appointments at will, overturn clinical procedures, even frogmarch a doctor to somebody’s front door. 

My inability to do anything of the sort was often mistaken for sheer reluctance: I was a vindictive fairy godmother who refused to wave her administrative wand. 

This isn’t to say that frustration is never justified. The wheels of the health service make slow, haphazard and maddening turns at the best of times: in a chronically underfunded organisation things frequently go wrong.

So far attention has focused, quite rightly, on the enormous challenges facing hospitals, particularly intensive care units. But this pandemic is not just about serious illness: it’s also about the anticipation of serious illness — the fear that it will harm us or those we love. 

This fear will infect thousands, if not millions, of daily exchanges between the British public and their health service from now on. 

I just hope, after the viral dust has settled and we all have time to reflect, that the NHS, as well as its workers, will never be taken for granted again.