Something for the next election that would help...
"In the last week there have been more media stories about yet more apparent incompetence in NHS healthcare, including on the 111 service for acute and short-term directive contact (Report, 30 July). What we are witnessing is the loss of a healthcare culture of personally invested connections and understandings. This has happened through attempts to emulate industrial manufacture and commercial trade. Before 20 years ago there was much good practice that was free of the current errors. For example, I was part of a GP out-of-hours rota which - together with our telephonists - provided a much more skilled, competent and personable service with little administrative clutter or expense.
Likewise, when I worked as a psychiatrist I was able to offer personal continuity of care over many years with the commensurate containing, and healing effects: this was humanly rich yet financially economical. These lost patterns of healthcare extended beyond sensitive and sensible care for patients, they were - indirectly though substantially - sources of human nourishment and enlivenment for healthcarers too: the doctors I know may now be paid more, but they have less personal work satisfaction.
In complex human welfare, if employees do not really like their work they are unlikely to ever do it well, whatever the strictures and structures. A commercially or industrially modelled system becomes humanly disconnected, then harmful and economically wasteful. The evidence for the failure of this approach is now ineluctable: it is a doomed project. We need to largely dismantle these well-intended but corrupting devices: autarkic and competing trusts; commercial subcontracting; payment by results; hegemonic goals and targets, algorithms, care pathways and statistics-before-sense. We need to understand and reclaim the underlying motivational and vocational psychology of our work: why and how should we care for one another? Our complex human bonds may then be better honoured.
Dr David Zigmond (GP)
London"
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/aug/07/doctors-more-sense-statisticsIgnorance is bliss, bliss is happiness, I am happy...to draw your attention to the possible connectivity in the foregoing.
