Adam Staten is a GP trainee in Surrey and is on Twitter @adamstaten.
LETTER TO THE HEALTH SECRETARY
Dear Mr Hunt,
Many congratulations on being re-appointed as Secretary of State for Health in the Conservative cabinet. May I suggest we treat your re-appointment as a fresh start?
As a gynaecology SHO performing intimate examinations I was once told to ‘go in like a butterfly and come out like a lion.’ The idea was to cause minimum discomfort by combining a gentle approach with a swift withdrawal. This was not a strategy you adopted when you began your intimate examination of the NHS in 2012. It did in fact feel quite rough and quite prolonged. This time around perhaps you could be a little more gentle with your ideas and re-organisations and, when we finally get a period of stability, come out like a lion and stop meddling.
On many occasions you have talked of ending a culture of bullying within the health service and yet have yourself employed a beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves attitude when dealing with its staff and this has endeared you to few. Attempting to bully the allied health professions of the NHS to fall into line with your ideas has not won you many friends.
For years NHS staff have hardly been able to turn on an NHS computer terminal without being greeted by your semi-psychotic stare and oddly geometric haircut as your picture has headed the endless bulletins and memoranda that spew forth from the Department of Health. Whilst producing a new edict may feel like a good days work to you, for those of us receiving it, it feels like an imposition, an interference and the promise of much more work for very little gain.
The smoke and mirrors re-organisations of the health care system that health ministers like yourself are fond of, the kind that generate a lot of activity, a rebranding or two and an apparent improvement in outcomes, actually distract from the business of treating patients.
Please remember too that the health care system is just that, a system for delivering health care. It is not a government tool to be used to address whatever national woes are troubling the electorate at any given moment. The NHS is not a branch of the benefits system nor is it an outpost of the immigration service.
Please dispense with ethically barren ideas such as denying benefits to people who refuse treatment for obesity. Doctors, nurses and other NHS staff should not feel obliged to coerce patients into treatments for purely financial reasons. Ideas such as this are eye catching and superficially gratifying to our vindictive sides but are unethical and unworkable in reality.
Neither can GPs solve the problems with immigration. Whilst it may seem an appealing idea to catch unsuspecting illegal immigrants whilst they are at their most vulnerable, the point when they seek medical help, most GPs would be reluctant to guilefully dupe immigrants into believing they were going to be given treatment for their illnesses before gleefully slinging them into detention. Please resist the compulsion to medicalise problems that are essentially social and political.
No-one would say that the NHS is a perfect system, but it is a good system. There is work to be done and changes to be made but trying to force all of them through between election cycles is devastating to the day-to-day functioning of health care.
You may like to think of the NHS as a wild stallion galloping powerfully through the plains of the UK. To tame it you can tie it up, beat it and try to break its will. This might work but, at the end of it, your stallion will be damaged both inside and out. Or you can whisper to it, coax it to your will with gentle reason and calm debate, and together we can ride off into the sunset.
I wish you well in your second stint at the helm of the NHS, and I hope you will wish us well in return.
Yours sincerely.
