Dr No has received many queries from baffled GPs stumped by how to vote in the RCGP President and Council elections. Problems have ranged from not knowing how to open the voting papers envelope, through not having the foggiest notion about how the single tranfserable vote works, to logging accidentally onto Facebook and sharing one’s voting preferences there, rather than on the secure voting website. Dr No understands voting can be difficult and stressful, and so he takes this opportunity to share with you this walk through on how to vote safely and effectively.
1. First, make sure you are sitting comfortably at a table or desk, with the unopened voting papers envelope placed in front of you. It is advisable to wear loose-fitting clothing, in case the excitement of participating in the election proves too much for you.
Today’s announcement by Scotland’s Minister for Emesis, Nicola Stugeron, that the Scottish government intends to set a 50p minimum unit price for alcohol reminds Dr No that a similar bell is set to toll South of the Border. Forty-eight hours after Porgie’s boomerang budget, the one that keeps on coming back to tap the Tories where it hurts, Theresa May was pushed on to the floor of the Commons, in a reckless bigger-the-pushed’un-the-better-the-cushion move, to zap hostile media coverage of the budget, by announcing the Westminster government’s own Alcohol Strategy. Needless to say, that strategy also contains proposals for minimum unit pricing, and, needless to say, both governments are equally deluded in their expectations that this daft policy will do any good. In fact, Dr No predicts it may even do harm. 
News of a sort emerged last week that the Iranian Hospitalier’s circle of shadowy investors are to receive an annual bung for stitching up Hinchingbrooke Hospital. The first £2 million of any surplus will be top-sliced, and wired to Jersey, or perhaps some other island where the sun shines a lot. The sweetener came to light after the Health Service Journal unearthed a 
Regular readers will know that Dr No is an advocate of Auric’s Law of Causes – happenstance, coincidence, enemy action – and it so happens that Auric’s Law has been met, indeed exceeded, in four out of four recent NHS encounters by family and friends of Dr No. In each case, the care provided was either partly or wholly inadequate and/or incompetent; and, by Auric’s Law, he concludes these adverse experiences did not arise by chance, but by malevolent force. The malevolent force was the NHS, or more specifically the doctors who provided (or in some cases did not provide) the care. All four cases happened in, or were related to, secondary (hospital) care, but more often than not the GP was also involved in, or at the least complicit with, the deficient care. In all four cases, either the patient or a relative was a doctor, and so an ‘expert witness’, able to ‘read’ what was going on. How much more poor care, one wonders, goes on, but is unnoticed, because the witnesses are lay, and lack the knowledge to read the signs?
The ballot for the next president of the Royal College of General Practitioners will soon be upon us. The field is strong, the going expected to be good, and in the interests of a spirited but fair race, Dr No offers – or perhaps that should be would like to share with you – his Ten Top Tips for RCGP Presidential Candidates.
Once upon a time, there were no GPs, only apothecaries. These corner-shop chemists evolved over time into today’s GPs, but their shop-keeping origins are still present even in today’s super-surgeries, and all the more so in the small lock-up single handed surgery. The short appointment times (it’s usually only a shopping trip, for Heaven’s sake), and expectation that the shopper-patient will not walk away empty-handed (what shop-keeper would so disappoint his or her customer?) are two leading characteristics of today’s general practice that stem directly from its apothecarial trade roots.
Word is in the air that The Beard is out to spike Max Pemberton. The redoubtable and excellent Max, whose weekly column in the Telegraph has repeatedly shone penetrating light on the sinister implications of the Tory NHS reforms – and here it is good to praise the Telegraph for printing copy critical of Tory policy – has, by way of his latest column, lit a burner under The Beard, and the balloon has gone up. Word further has it that the balloon is to be navigated to a position directly over Pembers, from which position it will descend hard on him, like a ton of bricks, or more precisely, £90,000 or more of legal costs. The threat follows an earlier failed attempt to drop a injunction banning publication on the Telegraph. You can – for now at least – read the article that provoked such corporate ire 
The Blameless Broadcasting Corporation, which doth protest too much, because it did take sides, by providing skimpy superficial coverage of the Health and Social Care Bill, have at last done something useful. An independent 
The Retail Raptor is developing a social conscience. Hot on the heels of her project to put the High back into High Street, she has moved on to save Britain’s dying textile industry. Following the trend set by Hacksaw’s there is ‘no such thing as society’, which taken to its logical conclusion means there is no such thing as Britain, and the rise of globalisation, Britain’s textile industry has, like many others, gone west by going east. Here at home, the looms lie still, the sewing machines silent, the thread of manufacture first snagged, then cut short. The grim jaws of benefit dependency have bitten across generations; the darkness of despondency and despair lies thickly in the air. This is the kind of blight up with which the Raptor will not put. 
Conveniently, the Health and Social Care Bill completed its final parliamentary stage on the eve of the budget, ensuring it was in hours knocked off the top of the news pile by Porgie’s Biddy Tax. But, mean as the Biddy Tax is, it is not the erosion and loss of the Pensioner’s Allowance that will hit Granny hard in the years to come, it is the erosion and loss of the NHS brought about by the Tories’ now soon to be unleashed health service reforms that will hit Granny – and indeed the rest of us when we need healthcare – hard. So the question arises: what are we going to do about it?