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I know this not because I am a doctor myself, but because I’ve spent the last two years studying one. Not surprisingly, young doctors often prefer a few days a week as a contracted locum without the pressure of also being responsible – as here – for the management and livelihoods of 140 staff. However, he deliberately ignored the contributions of Sassall’s wife – although the doctor and Betty were a team.
The big idea: why modern medicine can’t work without stories
Summer or winter, the lightscape [through the trees] above our heads is the most subjective of all woodland sceneries, for it resides solely in the eye of the beholder. Similarly, empathy and compassion have been shown to improve healthcare outcomes BJGP2013, but these are hard to achieve without time to listen. Vivid case studies of the patients and residents in the community are interspersed among beautiful and poignant nature writing. Precisely because the value of those relationships is difficult to render in cold, hard figures, performance metrics are skewed towards outcomes that are easier to quantify.A compelling storyteller in her own right, she told me during our first interview: “Yes, it’s important to examine people, but you work out what’s going on from the stories. Christina Patterson, Sunday Times The doctor's kindly, hollistic approach - she makes time to investigate her patients' social as well as physical needs - seems to evoke a lost world .
A Fortunate Woman - Polly Morland
In the past,” the doctor says of some of his lonelier and more troubled regulars, “they might have gone to see their vicar. We are now learning that this deep, accumulated knowledge was also palpably beneficial in medical terms. I enjoyed being able to experience the story of the Fortunate Woman doctor of the title on her own terms. In turn she spoke to the current doctor of the valley who said that Berger’s book had been a big influence on her own choices to become a doctor. This is what makes her a fortunate woman, and indeed all of us to be fortunate, witnesses to the extraordinary every day.The book maps on to Berger’s by likewise offering some case histories of the kind that might feature in a TV drama. It's a book that forces you to reflect on your own interpersonal connections and question if society's trajectory affords us a reasonable chance to meet the challenges of the future. And you know that if we lose general practice, we lose the NHS as we know it, with all the awful health inequalities that will follow. This beautifully crafted book drew me in immediately by reminding me of so many reasons why I became a general practitioner in the first place…a compelling narrative based on patient stories. They had all been “well meaning and professional”, but none had known her mother “before all this started, nor stayed long enough to get to know her now”.
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