Last week a Labour MP, Ann Clywd, claimed that the NHS in Wales had treated her dying husband like a battery hen and castigated low levels of nursing care. The social media response has been fascinating, and will mark a profound change in how the NHS is perceived.

The story has been carried prominently by all the UK national press and broadcasting channels. So one can read through many hundreds of reactions from readers from many different social and educational backgrounds. Vigorous debates are taking place. Here is the reader string for the Guardian with 295 comments. Here is the string for the Daily Mail with 95 comments.

What comes across clearly is that many others claim to have had similar experiences. There is a lot of anger out there.  You can also see much speculation as to why nursing standards often appear so low. These range from the frankly racist to informed comments from existing nursing staff, who typically claim that nurse to patient ratios have plummeted and that this explains any decline in care.

Of course, the response to a news item like this is very biased. Patients who have had good experiences on the NHS are unlikely to comment.

But it will have a strong effect on how people see the NHS and also how the media sees the NHS.

You can compare patients and their families to a herd of zebra surrounded by lions (the NHS and other healthcare services). Ten years ago the zebra didn’t know they should fear lions and, when they had a fatal encounter, few other zebra would learn of it. Today, thanks to social media, zebra know what is happening at the very back of the herd. Their perception of lions has changed dramatically.

The danger, of course, is that this will go too far. Just as the British keep their children off the street for fear of paedophiles, so they will become unreasoningly fearful of healthcare services.

Meanwhile, the reaction on these reader strings is likely to lead journalists to take a much more critical view of the NHS. Even five years ago it was considered racist by most journalists to suggest that immigration was a problem in the UK. Today the debate is happening and the same thing will happen with the NHS.

I’m guessing people in every European country are embarking on a similar journey. A revolution is going on which will create far more informed, far more opinionated patients who will be increasingly unwilling to defer to professional judgements. This will also inform politicians and policymakers.