Frankly, doctor, your bedside manner stinks
From Mmc
Frankly, doctor, your bedside manner stinks
Jasper Gerard Sunday May 6, 2007
One of those skinheaded human hamburgers who ooze bile from the terraces of Millwall FC would have been stunned into silence by the junior doctor on Question Time. His temperature gauge must have climbed higher than a Hillman Hunter's on a balmy July day queuing to get into Chessington Zoo. He screamed at Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, about why there weren't more jobs for him and his friends in the NHS.
Article continues All I could think was: 'Gulp! I hope he doesn't come near me with surgical gloves.' With the easy bedside manner of a crack Stasi interrogator, might his skills not be better utilised in, say, call-centre management or al-Qaeda? For I am about to say something blasphemous: does he deserve a job?
I bow to no one in my lack of admiration for Hewitt. She presides over an NHS which, depending on which figures you use, is just as inefficient or marginally less efficient than when Labour came to power: that is, before it pumped billions into an NHS that remains unaccountable to its users. It hasn't worked, as Labour was warned.
Hewitt has the unattractive quality, both on TV and in private, of making her audience feel like a class of seven-year-olds. But did she deserve quite so much rudeness from one so expensively educated?
'Thousands of doctors will be unemployed in a few months!' he screamed. 'That's your legacy! Go now!' But if there are job cuts in the army, the Defence Secretary doesn't resign. Doctors think they have a call on public funds - and sympathy - which is not enjoyed by any other profession.
Another doctor blurted out: 'Why not give them all jobs and be over-staffed for a couple of years?', suggesting he was wise to pursue a career in medicine rather than economics. Sure, it has been costly to train people for jobs that don't exist, sending doctors abroad. But this will merely go a little way to paying back countries whose medical staff we have pinched.
And I know the following will sound so mystifying to some NHS staff that it might as well be in Urdu, but is a little competition for NHS jobs so terrible? Only Gordon Brown faces less of a challenge for his desired job than traditionally confronted doctors do.
Amid the din, Hewitt made a devastating point: some junior doctors are struggling to secure posts because they insisted on specialising in non-priority areas such as plastic surgery. She suggested there might even be a shortage of takers for less glamorous posts, such as working with the elderly.
But as the insults flowed, the audience hollered. There is now an assumption that anyone in public life is fair game, not merely to be criticised, but to be lynched. A trivial example. Last week, Prince Harry was escorted from a nightclub after he was harangued by a man who called him, among other solicitudes, 'a twat'. Whether or not one takes issue with the general sentiment, why do people now think it legitimate to express it quite so colourfully?
As for the junior doctor, if he wants to earn a job, it is not enough to learn about medicine: he needs to learn some manners as well.
