This week Dr Custodes had
the chance to merge with the tribe of General Practice at the RCGP conference
in Harrogate.
The world is split in to
two kinds of people: those who believe that the college is an academic talking
shop filled with self-interested tweed, and those who haven’t joined yet.
There are
some universal truths in medicine: patients you do the most for are least
grateful; Friday night is the best time to present with unexplained weight loss
anorexia and altered bowel habit; and when it comes to money the first to the
trough eats most.
Things are getting back to normal after the summer break.
We’ve just had our last consultation event for the White Paper.
It was a very quiet meeting with lots of GPs sitting at the
back listening to some GPs sitting at the front telling all of us how the
future will look.
It’s amazing how the mood in the building can change so
quickly. I think we’re going to be starting a choir soon.
That will be nice, alongside the aromatherapy and basket
weaving we currently do for NHS staff to relieve stress.
Summer is often thought of as the silly season, full of
ridiculous news stories and weather bunnies saying ‘it’s hot’, then five
minutes later adding ‘sorry – it’s not’.
Inside the Black
Tower it truly is the
silly season. The latest wheeze dreamed up by our Director of Commissioning is
to hold an event that tells GPs ‘how it’s gonna be’. I think he might just be
missing the point about empowering GPs.
The post-election shenanigans were watched with trepidation
by my colleagues at the PCT.
So there was a collective sigh of relief when the coalition
reassured us that there would be no top-down restructuring of the NHS. Phew!
We’d only just got used to the last one.
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