The impression was of a gentler, more innocent healthcare age, now vanished in the mists of nostalgia – if, without a doubt it ever existed: the era idealised in Mrs Dale’s Diary and Dr Finlay’s Casebook, when doctors, like the parish priest or the dear previous loved ones solicitor, have been kindly, twinkling authority figures.
That such loved ones medical doctors existed outside the imaginations of novelists and radio scriptwriters is beyond doubt. For the 1st decade of my lifestyle I had one of my very own. Dr Chalmers was a pale, befreckled Scot with a manner of infinite charm. I was a sickly kid, so I had plenty of opportunities to visit him at his practice, with its magical smell of surgical spirit and anything much more ominous – formaldehyde? Ether? I loved him so a lot that for many years afterwards, getting sick had a particular glamour – until finally a succession of incompetent medical professionals briskly cured me of that harmful misapprehension.
The age of the beloved family physician is lengthy gone – overtaken by group practice, NHS reforms, and the extraordinary pressures on the general practice infrastructure, not to mention the peremptory sense of entitlement felt by contemporary patients and the corresponding decline of the GP as an authority figure.
Dr Hughes’s practice manager remarked that he was “like your old-fashioned medical doctor, who would go out of his way to do property visits and to get to know everyone personally”. That dedication to duty meant that his appointments overran, and frequently stored him at function till 11pm. As an individual effort, it is heroic. As a model for basic practice, it is not sustainable.
Yet there is a universal message in what Dr Hughes said about his career: “I have never disliked anyone I met… There are thousands of stories that I will get with me, and all of them so individual.”
That sense of being a part of his patients’ existence stories is undoubtedly the high quality that inspired the 4-hour queue of affectionate tributes. At some basic level, a healing curiosity in the narratives of other people should be the spark that ignites the ambition of everyone who chooses to qualify as a doctor. And though that idealism is effortlessly eroded by targets, spending budget constraints, political exigence and the sheer grind of seeing sick men and women, not all of them grateful or appealing, day soon after day, in the extremely very best medical professionals the spark remains alight.
Because my 1st family members physician retired I have noticed innumerable GPs. Some have been type. Some have been terrible (the girl who dismissed my ruinously detached retinas with the brisk tips that I’d see completely well if I acquired my hair out of my eyes lingers in the memory). Most produced me feel much better, at some point. But the very ideal of them had a high quality of humanity for which I, too, would queue around the block to say thank you.
A fantastic loved ones medical professional is a treasure past price
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