If someone told you the world was ending and gave you ten minutes to fix it, you’d probably express some mild expletives. This is a complete exaggeration to vent my frustrations at the expectations we have of primary care physicians. My point is primary care physicians are amazing. They can deal with almost every situation from […]
Category: NHS
Jan Filochowski: No room at the inn—the NHS today?
The NHS’s critical problem today is not that things are bad, it is that they are getting much worse at a very fast rate across the board. In 40 years involvement in managing NHS services I have never known a time when they haven’t been under pressure from rising demand or when governments haven’t said they […]
Nick Hopkinson on Steve Biko, the NHS, and the mind of the oppressed
It would have been Steve Biko’s seventieth birthday this weekend. The anti-apartheid leader was beaten to death by the South African Police in a jail cell in 1977. His death was a medical scandal too—doctors acquiesced in his being driven, semi-conscious and chained, the 700 miles from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria. Developing his program of […]
Kushal Patel: Pay inequity spells a winter of discontent for junior doctors
This past year has been particularly turbulent for junior doctors nationwide. Mired in a public standoff with the government and with lacklustre stop-start plans for industrial action, it has rendered them a workforce that feels at best confused and at worst abandoned by its union. It is safe to say that morale has sunk to […]
Saffron Cordery: Reasons for winter pressures—flying under the radar
For your average Joe Blow it must be hard to work out why, every winter, there is such a commotion about pressures in the health service and particularly in A&E. Surely, after so many years, it could be sorted out? I think that puzzlement is also widespread amongst those of us working in or alongside […]
Penny Pereira: Dr Flow—the role of the medical profession in improving flow
Packed waiting rooms, delays in getting results, ambulances queuing, patients and results getting “lost” in the system: the daily frustrations facing people using and working in the NHS have become so familiar, it’s easy to start to accept them as inevitable. Or, even if these obstacles are not seen as inevitable, the effort needed to keep […]
Elizabeth Anderson and Simon Bennett: Are we serious about changing culture?
Healthcare education has enormous capacity to equip future practitioners with the right mindset to promote supportive team-based cultures within the NHS. By this we mean that during training all practitioners should develop skills needed to work in a community that is then manifest when working in clinical and other care situations. They should know how […]
Gareth Iacobucci: Jeremy’s firm hand casts a shadow
Jeremy Hunt caught a few people off guard at this week’s NHS Providers conference when he unexpectedly announced a flurry of new policies. Those who have heard the health secretary give dozens of speeches over the past four years had their usual game of “Jeremy Hunt bingo” (key watchwords: patient safety, technology, Virginia Mason [The award […]
Jonathan Glass: Irrational numbers in surgical training
I enjoy numbers. I enjoy the accuracy they provide; the guidance they give in the practise of clinical medicine; and, though very far from being a mathematician, I like reading of their discovery throughout history, their quirkiness, and I like being shown their logic even though I know I won’t be able to remember or […]
Delan Devakumar et al: Politicians need to first do no harm
It’s been a monumental year. The UK’s decision to leave the European Union and the Chilcot report on the Iraq war prompt us to wonder why these self-inflicted problems ever happened. The legacies of David Cameron and Tony Blair will be dominated by Brexit and Iraq respectively. Different in many ways, but each was a […]