Of all the reasons to end a long and bitter industrial dispute, imposing an unwelcome contract on a demoralised workforce to "end the uncertainty" has to be the most bizarre, given the inevitable outcome of the imposition will be not less, but more uncertainty. The demoralised workforce, our junior doctors, are already in bad shape, overstretched and in poor morale. Record numbers are considering – though we don’t yet know how many will pull the ejector seat lever – working abroad. Late last year we learnt that almost half of juniors completing their foundation training chose not to proceed directly with their training – a sure sign of ambivalence about the direction of their chosen career. Hospitals face unprecedented recruitment problems, winter pressures are now being mirrored by summer pressures, with the imminent prospect of all year round pressures. The health service is in a critical way, at risk of implosion. So what does the Health Secretary do when he doesn’t get his own way with the juniors? He hits them on the head. Hard.
Working in the NHS
The Last Junior Doctor
As the post nuclear option Heremy Junt/BMA contract row rumbles on behind the scenes – the top hit on google news today for junior doctor contract is a three day old blog post on Conservative Home by a psychiatrist sorely in need of Photoshop if ever there was one, and the BMA’s ‘latest update’ is weeks old, a thoughtful post by JT reminds us that the opposing comedy duo of Junt and the BMA Junta are not the only threats to junior doctors. The SPECTRE known for the time being as NICE, the National Institute for Clinician Evisceration, has produced yet more guidelines on statins. Commendably dense with the rhetoric of patient choice, the general thrust is nonetheless on upping the uptake. JT’s gripe is three fold. The first is that clinical guidelines, statistical tools, algorithms, call them what you will, become wet paper bags when they attempt to contain the complexity of real life. The second is that guidelines alongside variations of payment by result tends to get, well, results, ie more people on statins, without care for whether they want them or need them. The third, touched on more briefly, but just as important, is that, up against the hour glass of surgery time, thoughtful deliberation never stood a chance. It is the dead duck floating feet defiantly up, but head drowned in the time-hoopered barrel of clinical complexity.
The Strike That Passed in the Night
At the eleventh hour, the BMA suspended the junior doctors’ strike. It hasn’t been called off entirely, it may still happen, but probably won’t. As a conspiracy theorist, Dr No suspects the whole shebang was a clever ruse by the doctors: a strike that was not a strike, a neat foil to Absolutely Stilton’s tanks lining up in the hospital car park; as a cock-up theorist, he suspects the whole bang shoot is further evidence that, even if it wanted to, the BMA couldn’t fire a rocket on Guy Fawkes Day. Apart from some bizarre even by Daily Mail standards doctors’ leader in love nest in Neasden style hackery, not to mention its doctors on dark web exposé, media coverage has been thin for what is after all serious domestic news. At the coming up of the sun, the Today programme looked the other way, and at the going down of the sun, Hoo Wedwards and his harem of squawking reporterettes hardly ever mentioned the conflict. There was some coverage of the ‘overwhelming’ 98% in favour ballot result, but few pointed out that 98% of those who voted is about just over half of all junior doctors, though even that is still an eye-watering result. For the BBC in particular, the junior doctors’ contract was, like the Health and Social Care Bill before it, to be just another ship that passed in the night.
Breaking Bad
Like a pair of blind impotent bulls, Humph and Jimbo crashed about the Today studio this morning, breaking bad, but not much in the way of news. The programme reverberated to the dull thud of blunt horns getting stuck in wooden stories. Humph deployed his standard technique of exclaiming ‘Ha!’ every time an interviewee started to answer a question, to put the interviewee off balance, while Jimbo has extended his extended question technique by inserting…long…pauses. More crotchety than ever, Jimbo has even started to avoid questions altogether, preferring instead to crochet together a long series of statements…and pauses…and…assertions, more waffle, more saccharisms, more Jimboisms…before delivering a final semi-triumphant statement, leaving the by now stunned hapless interviewee little to do except to agree.
Ill Winds
The other day we had David Cameron getting pumped up about a seven day NHS. Pumped up is the New Tory, but a lot of old hats were still put on pegs, some hats more moth-eaten than others. JC (of the Department of Health Sunshine Band) was wheeled onto the Today programme, sounding about as pumped up as a flat tyre. Despite the ill wind blowing today through NHS General Practice, with more vacancies than currants in a bun, the government’s prescription is five thousand more GPs. Quite which wind these GPs will arrive by has yet to be explained. Historically, the NHS has outsourced, or at least gained, extra doctors from abroad. Pigs, after all, can always fly, if they are pumped up enough.
Making Ministers Happy
Just as forecasters talk of a ‘fog situation’ or a ‘snow event’, so do medical educators now talk of the ‘shape of training’. Why the accessory words are needed is beyond Dr No, but then again he is not all that surprised because the recent Shape of Training Review – hashtag ShoT or in this parish bashtag ROT – was led by a certain eminence situation, one Prof Sir David Greenaway, a distinguished looking egg-head and leading light from the science that makes astrology look good. The #ShoT review’s publication situation was treated by and large as a no news situation – maybe being #ShoT didn’t help - though for some reason the BBC did cover it, and of course our dear friend the Ferret Fancier has been poking holes in the review for some time. One of the Ferret Fancier’s notable achievements has been, on appeal, to get an order for the release of certain GMC minutes of #ShoT/DoH meetings, which the GMC had previously determined should most definitely remain as an ongoing non-situation.
Shakin’ Stevens
Yesterday’s news was bob-a-job docs, £55 for each and every dementia diagnosis, with old hands who should know better – they have been handbagging item of service fees in various shapes and forms since the beginning of time – decrying the idea as bribery, likely to cloud professional judgement, possibly even unethical. Dr No will believe their wails when they start handing back the contents of their handbags. For his part, Dr No thinks the idea, though crude, is not without merit, even if the sum is paltry for what is rather more long-term work than a snap diagnosis, because it sends a signal in terms the ex-apothecaries have always understood – payment for an item of service. Dementia is under-diagnosed, and patients and carers who want to know and plan miss out on help that is or at least should be available. Indeed, upping the recorded prevalence might even push up dementia funding. So all in all, though a bit grubby, the idea gets Dr No’s approval.
Toothless Wonder
Dr No gazed in open-mouthed if not toothless wonder as the first episode of Frankie (BBC1) unfolded last night. Not content to be the life and soul of the party, Frankie, a SuperNurse for the time being on the district beat, is the life and soul of the known universe. In a script that pasted it on like a bricklayer mortaring a wall, Frankie was given lines to assist even the dimmest viewer to a full comprehension of Frankie’s awesome powers. When cutbacks have ordinary doctors and nurses quivering, what does Frankie do? Why, she laughs at the cuts! When a cut of a literal sort threatens to come her way in the hands of a demented war veteran, she turns the other cheek. Nothing is beyond the toothless wonder’s extraordinary powers. When a child arrests in her car, Frankie becomes paramedic and then emergency ambulance driver; later, she turns her hand to a spot of midwifery. Dr No suspects Frankie has a fold-up operating theatre in the boot of her car, and in later episodes will turn her hand to a spot of surgery. Nothing is beyond Frankie for, as she told at least one gagging viewer, ‘the world is her patient’. When not fixing the world, Frankie likes to turn up the stereo, and dance, turning the show into a musical: Frankie Goes To Bollywood. Truly, nothing is beyond Frankie, but then, Dr No supposes, that is what happens when you have done Torchwood. Even Captain Jack has been turned into a shadow of his former self, a hapless plod who’s always got the wood, but never gets his way, because every time he gets his pecker out, Frankie’s away.
Affection Love and Duty, These Three
Dr No’s mother is a heartsink patient, and she happens to be dying. Unpalatable as they may be, Dr No says these two things as matters of fact. On one level, as a doctor, he cannot not see his mother as he would see a patient – and the hallmarks of heartsinkery are undeniably present. Although Dr No has had a hunch about prognosis for some time, it was his mother’s consultant who gave it form, in a measure of months. She is a heartsink patient, with only months left to live. Those who care to opine that heartsink is a term of derogatory abuse might also care to reflect that the term is not so much a patient label, notwithstanding the inescapable fact it is one, as a useful term from the lexicon of countertransference, under the general heading of those feelings and emotions engendered in a doctor by his or her patient. Countertransference matters: those who choose to ignore it do so at great peril, not just for the patient, but also for themselves.
Making Friends and Family of Us All
Paul Corrigan, whose posts show a worrying trend towards titles so long they stand as posts in their own right, has declared himself a friend of FFT, the punter-friendly friends and family test based on asking patients at or soon after discharge whether they would recommend the unit they have just left to friends and family. The test is popular with government for its apparent simplicity, resented by managers for the real extra burden it imposes, and derided by front-line staff, for whom the test might be better known as the Flying F*ck Test: the punters don’t give a FF about responding, and we don’t give a FF about the results. Although first announced last year, FF testing was back in the news last week after friendly we’re all in this together Dave announced plans to extend FF testing to general practice. The news got a cool response from senior GPs; others went further. One called the test ‘meaningless’; another dubbed it ‘trite’.