GPs will stand up for their patients, even if Wes Streeting and the government won't.

Call To Action

I’ve been speaking to doctors about what’s going wrong in the NHS, and what needs to change, for a long time. I’ve had thousands upon thousands of private messages, Facebook group discussions, phone calls and emails and more. I receive messages from doctors at their lowest points; when they are most worried about their patients, the state of the service, and the welfare of their colleagues.

The things they say sit in stark contrast with the way they are often portrayed in the newspapers, which often speak about doctors negatively. The media make insinuations or downright accusations of greed, laziness and self-interest. But my experience, based on communications conducted during the height of national crises, communicated on Christmas Eve night as doctors stare down the barrel of unsafe situations, or on-call shifts when they’re insufficiently protected with safe PPE, is that doctors are mostly concerned about others, not themselves.

Doctors contact me much more frequently when they are scared about someone else’s safety than they do about their own. In general they are stoic and endure an awful lot, often silently, and often to the point at which it feels like they can’t tolerate any more. Medicine, unfortunately, can be harsh and unkind to those who practice. I can speak about this openly and without fear of any impact on my standing or reputation, because I no longer work clinically. But I used to regularly telephone the hospital wards to find out how my patients were doing because I could not sleep for worry at 2am, and I certainly was not alone.

The pressures are unbelievable, and doctors are expected to withstand those pressures. One of the jobs I did as a junior doctor involved assessing new patients as they arrived in the hospital. There was an unwritten rule that at the end of the 13 hour weekend shift, you could not leave the hospital until there were fewer than ten patients waiting to be “clerked” (assessed and examined). You’d get up and continue working until the work was done. It was absolutely brutal, and this is not an uncommon situation.