David Zigmond was a London GP for forty years. He is also trained in psychiatry and psychotherapy. Many of his writings on themes of humanism (and its lack) in healthcare can be found on his website.
Serial NHS reforms are destroying continuity of patient care – the very thing that used to make GPs feel their jobs were worthwhile. No wonder so many are leaving.
The nature of our departures from our work often tells us much about what kind of problems are being left behind. The individual may escape, but what about the wider community?
The greatest reward of being a doctor - relating to patients as fellow complicated human beings - has been lost amidst the growth of tick-box, corporatised management that treats all doctors as if they were 'duffers'.
Doctors are being turned into Commissars, Apparatchiks and Healthdroids, mutely collaborating with endless health ‘reforms’. History reminds us why we must resist such totalitarianism.
Has there really been a breakthrough in talking treatments for depression as claimed, or are formulaic policies driving out more humane interactions with the mentally unwell?
The toxic burden of the market is dooming the NHS to disintegration and depersonalisation - yet GPs coralled into Clinical Commissioning Groups aren’t even allowed to question it.
New NHS boss Simon Stevens will inherit an NHS in crisis. Will his outsider status and private sector experience be just the new broom the NHS needs - or is that part of the problem?
Transparency, Accountability and Democracy can seem like a protective triumvirate for public decision making, but these can easily turn shallow, demotic and false.
