Month: March 2010

Trust Me, I’m a Trust

why.jpgThe Orwellian coup of calling the corporate bodies that run the NHS ‘trusts’ – with the comforting overtones of propriety and trustworthiness - hides the fact that underneath the surface they are like any other corporation: selfish, secretive and psychopathic.

Dr No was brought to this cheerful observation by a dull but worthy documentary aired by BBC2 last week. Fronted by a man with a puffy dial whose every alternate sentence started ‘I wanted to find out…’, Why Did You Kill my Dad? was an over-scripted attempt to, err, find out ‘the true scale and [human] cost of killings by the mentally ill in Britain today’.

Virgin Shags Assura

virgin.jpgBig business is all about big branding, and nobody does branding better than Branson. His red logo is just about everywhere – travel, banks, media, mobiles, you name it – except healthcare. Until now, that is. Earlier this week, the Virgin Group bagged a three quarter share in Assura Medical, the company that runs the Khazi Klinics.

Virgin have been sniffing the panties of healthcare for some time, but, like most novices, were for some time unsure about how to proceed. “For us, this is the culmination of what has probably been five years of knowing we wanted to be in this space but really not finding the right entry point,” said Gordon McCallum, chief executive of Virgin Management. Now they have found the ‘entry point’, the shagging can begin in earnest.

Why Revalidation is Wicked

trust.jpgIn its proper form, the doctor-patient relationship is not unlike a marriage. It is founded, above all else, on trust.

The essence of trust is an implicit assumption of the benevolence of the other. Good marriages do not rely on annual appraisal folders, multi-source feedback or revalidation to stay on course; instead the partners simply trust each other. Indeed, the very concept of needing to re-establish trust periodically would be laughable. Why then do the medical revalidatchiks – the Obersturmführer Marshalls of this world – insist that we must replace implicit trust with explicit checking; and that revalidation is now a professional imperative, a ‘core professional activity and responsibility’ that we doctors ignore at out peril?