Like church and state, medicine and politics are traditionally seen as a queasy mix. The last thing you want in your flimsy hospital gown is some zealot with a stethoscope trying to sway your vote. Doctors, at the bedside, should clearly stick to doctoring. But – in a world of ever more outlandishly spun health statistics – where, outside of clinical encounters, do the limits of doctors’ duty to act in our patients’ best interests lie?
I made the sobering discovery, in my first few weeks as a doctor, that serving patients in the modern NHS was at least as much to do with advocacy as medicine. It has to be, in a system that’s stretched beyond breaking point. With resources so scarce, speaking out counts.
Once, I actually stalked a professor, in sheer desperation to provide an inpatient with decent care. He did a double take at the steely-eyed junior doctor, sat perched outside his clinic, fired up to plead her patient’s case. With everyone run ragged, overwhelmed by patients, no one had believed me or cared enough to act when I’d insisted my patient was suffering from a rare diagnosis, adult-onset Stills disease, that had left her heart swamped in fluid, her temperature soaring, her circulation so fragile it might need intensive care. “Please,” I begged. “Just see her for yourself.” As the pre-eminent professor of rheumatology in my hospital, he was the one man I knew who might act. And he did. He confirmed the diagnosis and whisked my patient off to his specialist care, possibly saving her life.
When almost every statistic about today’s NHS depicts a system quietly imploding around us, advocacy writ large has never mattered more. Doctors, like nurses, bear daily witness to the facts behind the spin. Our testimony is a vital corrective to a government hell-bent on airbrushing away the truth about today’s underfunded NHS. We look the patients in the eye as they languish on trolleys in hospital corridors. We apologise, shamefaced, to the families whose loved ones are stranded in hospital, because no social care exists to support their safe discharge home. We turn away the elderly who sob in A&E because the pain in their hip is beyond endurance, yet who haven’t even made it on to a waiting list for surgery. If we turned a blind eye and kept our heads down, would Hippocrates nod his assent?
Having to break bad news to a patient is never easy. But unflinching conversations are a cornerstone of good medicine
The state of the NHS in 2017 demands that doctors speak out about the human cost of underfunding since it clear our political leaders will not. Only this week, Theresa May made an election manifesto commitment of 10,000 more staff in mental health. Unfunded, needless to say, but also – more audaciously – a promise made on the back of the 6,700 mental health staff already culled since the Conservatives came to power in 2010. It’s this kind of political doublespeak that compels doctors to challenge loudly the government line that – despite the most brutal funding squeeze in NHS history – everything is going swimmingly.
In microcosm, we already know what happens when cost-cutting is prioritised above patient care. The scandal of Mid Staffs – a stain upon the history of the NHS, in which patients in their thousands were subjected to inhumane care – arose when one hospital trust strove to slash costs by millions. Yet currently, the government is enforcing £22bn of “efficiency savings” across the NHS, while insisting excellence of care can somehow continue.
Doctors should call out this claptrap for what it is. We are, after all – perhaps more than anyone – trusted to tell unpalatable truths. In this case, the hard medicine is more taxes. A world-class health service requires world-class funding. Either we provide the budget to fit the health care we want, or we cut the NHS to fit the amount we’re willing to spend on health. With a government too cowardly to confront this simple truth out loud, doctors should force an honest debate.
Yet – with a few notable exceptions (Taj Hassan and Neena Modi, for example, the presidents of the Royal Colleges of Emergency Medicine and of Paediatrics and Child Health respectively), the medical establishment is loath to rock the boat. Where is the joint statement from the Royal Colleges, for instance, urging increased taxation to bring our NHS and social care spend to at least the levels of Germany and France? Where are the hospital medical directors brave enough to speak out in public against the ever more fanciful diktats from on high to keep on delivering as their funding dries up?
Having to break bad news to a patient is never easy. But unflinching conversations are a cornerstone of good medicine. Nationally, doctors should be telling it like it is: without more money, our NHS is in relentless, terminal, and wholly avoidable decline.
Doctors owe it to patients to tell the truth: the NHS is in terminal decline | Rachel Clarke
