Reflections 50. From US Private Healthcare, To Head of the NHS in England, To the House of Lords…
Call To Action
There’s something happening in UK medicine that should have happened years ago.
It didn’t happen because many doctors were too busy, too ground-down, and too committed to playing their part in the delivery of NHS healthcare to see what some of our leaders were doing. While frontline healthcare professionals were working harder and harder to hold the system together, those at the top were playing a different game.
When things get busy in the NHS - and they’ve been getting busier for over a decade now - staff get their heads down, work harder, work quicker, and do whatever they can to keep their patients safe. When you’re working on a ward, or in a clinic, or are busy in a room at a GP surgery, it’s difficult to think about anything else. You’re acutely aware of the needs all around you, and responding to those needs takes up all of the bandwidth you can muster. Other people, in far-removed rooms, in esteemed medical institutions, have not been so consumed with the needs of their patients. Instead, some medical leaders have been complicit with what politicians are doing; either staying silent when they should have spoken up, or even defending the damaging policies as they’ve been rolled out one by one.
But you can only push people so far. Everyone has a limit to their resilience and their tolerance. If the limit is broached, they’ll snap, and it looks like many doctors have finally snapped, and are pushing back impressively in multiple ways.