In my blog last week, I mentioned that my next one might be contentious. This is it.

Tonight, Health Service Journal (HSJ) have announced their inaugural list of Patient Leaders.

I am stunned to be on it. Plus a little bit anxious and also prouder than I have felt for a long time. Here’s why.

I’ve been on a few lists in my time. I remember the first one of influential women in the NHS. Some of us got a bit of stick for that, as did HSJ – “What about the influential men?” came the cry. Take a look at the top of the NHS, and you will see why there is a need for a list with just women on it. Even more so for Black and Minority Ethnic NHS leaders. Hats off to @NHS_Dean who has been open about changing his mind recently regarding quotas on Boards. It’s not too late to join him.

There are many other reasons why such lists can cause controversy. One is that they seem to include all the obvious people, who have reached positions of influence “just” by the nature of their jobs. Who have apparently been in the right place at the right time. Whose mistakes haven’t yet caught up with them. Or who are lucky enough to have a face that “fits”.

I’ve been there and even made such remarks. And I know that, although doing so might have made me feel better about not being on some list or another myself, it also introduced a tiny chip of meanness into my heart which I then had to work very hard to eradicate. Or it risked undermining me and any future good I might bring to bear.

To the people who are feeling mean about this latest list, I say this. Yes, some of the names on it may seem obvious to you. But only they know the personal cost of being there. And yes, there may be some, me included, who are relatively late entrants to the patient leadership world. But that doesn’t make them, even me, unworthy, nor does it in any way diminish the extraordinary contribution of those who have been doing this labour of love for much longer than the rest of us.

Being a member of an exclusive, perhaps even excluded club may feel good, especially one whose purpose has been to act as a ginger group. But patient leaders are doing work that is too important to remain on the outside looking in. One day, and I don’t think it will be all that long, we will see experts by experience appointed into paid leadership roles right across the NHS and care system, as a matter of course. We must of course protect their independence. But we must also stop seeing them as an optional, expensive, fortunate and patronised extra.

There is nothing I did throughout my 41 year NHS career that was harder than sharing my own experiences of mental illness, facing up to going back to work after my last episode of depression, and then retiring, I hope with dignity, to forge a new career as a writer and mental health campaigner. I know it will have been equally hard for others to have followed their personal, not always chosen, path.

So let us warmly thank EVERY patient and carer leader for the courage, wisdom, creativity and generosity they bring to improve our less than perfect, still beautiful, deeply precious NHS. And to all those on tonight’s list, here’s to you. I feel humbled to have joined your extraordinary ranks.

*With thanks to the extraordinary Kate Bornstein, whose philosophy on life is “Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living. Just don’t be mean.”