It’s relief rather than rapture that my health has seen off the patchy period of healthcare provision. It means that I’m safe for another five days.

Even if I’m commanded by the alarm clock to get out of my bed at an earlier than desired hour, I know I’ve made it through another risky two days. If you’ve ever fallen ill or had a nasty accident requiring hospital intervention at the ‘weekend’ (that’s night until Sunday evening), you’ll know exactly what I mean. I’m only half joking (and using the blackest humour to do so) when I say that we should all celebrate being alive and well and ready to start a new day and more significantly, a new week.

Nobody can predict the course of their own (or anybody else’s) health. Some people are affected by accident or illness when they’re young and active whilst others are affected as they get older. Similarly, you don’t get to choose the day of the week when you become ill or experience a serious medical incident or emergency.

The pledge made by David Cameron that under a future Conservative government all hospitals in England would provide “a truly seven-day NHS” (by 2020) is a welcome one.

The announcement was made at the party’s spring forum where the Prime Minister said that more hospitals must provide top-level treatment at the weekend, starting with emergency care. Naturally, they’ve already come under fire from political opponents that say that funding cuts threaten the very existence of the NHS as we know it.

Nobody needs me to tell them that the Friday night session in A&E is the busiest of the week. Naturally, there are the usual pressures on resources plus those injured as a result f Friday nights ‘on the town’, not to mention those who know that as the weekend progresses will have an even smaller chance of being seen by a healthcare professional. Expanding health cover at the weekends and even in the evenings is going to be a popular message, welcomed especially by people with long term, unpredictable illnesses and disabilities as well as those one in 5 people that figures suggest are unable to make appointments with their doctor work because of working commitments and the like.

The two issues that I’d most like clarity on are of course: the funding arrangements that’ll need to be made to achieve this monumental idea and secondly, how voters can believe any such claim since I think you’ll find that a 2010 manifesto commitment from the Conservative party under Cameron pledged guaranteed access to a GP seven days a week between the hours of 8am and 8pm. (Although access, it turns out, can technically mean different things, such as a triage phone call or talking with a GP through the NHS 111 Helpline.)

My thinking is that this broad-brush statement lacks real clarity and is a likely attempt to ‘park’ the NHS as an issue in the minds of voters so that the Conservatives can talk more about their favoured subject, the economy. I broadly predict today, on the first day of the General Election campaign, that the two broad themes of campaigning are actually going to be ‘double talk’ and ‘interpretation’. In other words, the commitments of all parties are likely to be written from start to finish in difficult to decipher ‘small print’.