Late April 2016. As hospital consultants and staff doctors across England prepare for the first ever full walk out by junior doctors, similar preparations take place at Walmington-on-Sea…
Scene: The local District General Hospital Casualty Department. Mainwaring and his platoon stand facing each other. All are wearing baggy theatre greens with stethoscopes draped in the modern fashion round their necks, except Wilson who is wearing a Prince of Wales check suit, with a large neurologist’s hat-pin in his lapel. Frazer has on an ENT surgeon’s head mirror, flipped to the up position, and the light reflects off it like a heliograph as he darts glances here and there. Mainwaring has a vintage WWII flare pistol in a holster on a belt, strictly for emergency use only.
MAINWARING: Hurry up and get changed, Wilson.
2017: Mid term and the Tories have got fed up with pesky doctor led clinical commissioning groups. The government fires all medical commissioners and appoints its own chosen panel members, often high profile individuals with no understanding of the health service. Westminster’s own clinical commissioning group, known locally as the Dragons’ Den, has a panel consisting of Alan Yentob, Lord Sugar, John Humphrys, Jo Brand and, in a nod to glamour, Siobhan Sharpe, who replaces Stilton, fired because all he ever said was ‘absolutely’. The top of Yentob’s head glows, as if there was a halo inside trying to get out, Sugar has blacked himself up and looks like the last king of a minor African state, Humph sits crumpled like a sack of potatoes with a particularly large King Edward with two eyes in it sticking out of the top, and while the other panel members have stacks of tenners on the tables to their sides, Brand has a stack of Black Forest gateaux. Sharpe is taking a selfie.
Imagine for a moment Dr No is now a peer, Lord No (of Nowhere), and it has come to his fancy that there are a lot of worthwhile advertising folk out there who are being cruelly frustrated in their attempts innovate by a constant fear of litigation. Radical campaigns to sell coals to Newcastle, defy gravity and achieve eternal life, these two possibly at the same time, though the Church has had a protected monopoly on promoting that particular proposition for the last two millennia, have remained but twinkles in the eyes of advertising executives. Those pesky anti-free market types have got too big for their boots; and every day, another regulator leans forward to breathe down the necks of advertising executives. A chill hangs over the corridors of innovative advertising; brilliance lies stunned into submission. All in all, it’s enough to make a right-thinking peer weep.
Scene: The Today Programme Studio, sometime after half past seven on Saturday 16th August 2014.
For Immediate Release:
Now that Call 111 has gone live, Dr No has sent a team of his crack undercover reporters into 111 call centres to discover how the new service is working.
Dr Max Pemberton – Apology
These days, nothing really happens until it happens on social media. Apart from curmudgeonly old duffers like Dr No, anybody who is anything is busy on twitter. Why, even HRH is on twitter! The NHS, it seems, is all over twitter like pigeons all over Trafalgar Square. Hospital trusts, ambulance control centres, continence control services, you name them, there they are on twitter, tweeting away, like pigeons all over…
Dr No is fed up with the Health and Social Care Bill, and the interminable waffle that surrounds it. To him, it is clearly the death warrant to the National Health Service. Once enacted, it will allow any willing cowboy – and that includes the unscrupulous doctors amongst us - to ride into town, and hawk their wares. Britain’s greatest post-war achievement, healthcare on need not ability to pay, will be dynamited, and Wild West law will prevail. Many, far too many, will perish.
Scene: a secret bar located in the basement of Number Ten. The Prime Minister and his Director of Communications sit alone sipping lager.