According to a helpful app on my phone that I like to think acts as a brake on my sloth, I retired 313 days ago. One of the reasons I retired was so that I could get some serious work done; I increasingly felt that professional academic life was incompatible with the sort of academic life I signed up for. If you read my previous post, you will see this was not the only reason, but since I have always been more of an academic than clinician, my argument still stands.

Over twenty years ago, my friend and former colleague, Bruce Charlton, observed wryly that academics felt embarrassed — as though they had been caught taking a sly drag round the back of the respiratory ward — if they were surprised in their office and found only to be reading. No grant applications open; no Gantt charts being followed; no QA assessments being written. Whatever next.

I thought about retirement from two frames of reference. The first, was about finding reasons to leave. After all, until I was about 50, I never imagined that I would want to retire. I should therefore be thrilled that I need not be forced out at the old mandatory age of 65. The second, was about finding reasons to stay, or better still, ‘why keep going to work?’. Imagine you had a modest private income (aka a pension), what would belonging to an institution as a paid employee offer beyond that achievable as a private scholar or an emeritus professor? Forget sunk cost, why bother to move from my study?

Many answers straddle both frames of reference, and will be familiar to those within the universities as well as to others outwith them. Indeed, there is a whole new genre of blogging about the problems of academia, and employment prospects within it (see alt-acor quit-lit for examples). Sadly, many posts are from those who are desperate to the point of infatuation to enter the academy, but where the love is not reciprocated. There are plenty more fish in the sea, as my late mother always advised. But looking back, I cannot help but feel some sadness at the changing wheels of fortune for those who seek the cloister. I think it is an honourable profession.

Many, if not most, universities are very different places to work in from those of the 1980s when I started work within the quad. They are much larger, they are more corporatised and hierarchical and, in a really profound sense, they are no longer communities of scholars or places that cherish scholarly reason. I began to feel much more like an employee than I ever used to, and yes, that bloody term, line manager, got ever more common. I began to find it harder and harder to characterise universities as academic institutions, although from my limited knowledge, in the UK at least, Oxbridge still manage better than most ¹. Yes, universities deliver teaching (just as Amazon or DHL deliver content), and yes, some great research is undertaken in universities (easy KPIs, there), but their modus operandi is not that of a corpus of scholars and students, but rather increasingly bends to the ethos of many modern corporations that self-evidently are failing society. Succinctly put, universities have lost their faith in the primacy of reason and truth, and failed to wrestle sufficiently with the constraints such a faith places on action — and on the bottom line.

Derek Bok, one of Harvard’s most successful recent Presidents, wrote words to the effect that universities appear to always choose institutional survival over morality. There is an externality to this, which society ends up paying. Wissenschaft als Beruf is no longer in the job descriptions or the mission statements².

A few years back via a circuitous friendship I attended a graduation ceremony at what is widely considered as one of the UK’s finest city universities³. This friend’s son was graduating with a Masters. All the pomp was rolled out and I, and the others present, were given an example of hawking worthy of an East End barrow boy (‘world-beating’ blah blah…). Pure selling, with the market being overseas students: please spread the word. I felt ashamed for the Pro Vice Chancellor who knew much of what he said was untrue. There is an adage that being an intellectual presupposes a certain attitude to the idea of truth, rather than a contract of employment; that intellectuals should aspire to be protectors of integrity. It is not possible to choose one belief system one day, and act on another, the next.

The charge sheet is long. Universities have fed off cheap money — tax subsidised student loans — with promises about social mobility that their own academics have shown to be untrue. The Russell group, in particular, traducing what Humboldt said about the relation between teaching and research, have sought to diminish teaching in order to subsidise research, or, alternatively, claimed a phoney relation between the two. As for the “student experience”, as one seller of bespoke essays argued⁴, his business model depended on the fact that in many universities no member of staff could recognise the essay style of a particular student. Compare that with tuition in the sixth form. Universities have grown more and more impersonal, and yet claimed a model of enlightenment that depends on personal tuition. Humboldt did indeed say something about this:

“[the] goals of science and scholarship are worked towards most effectively through the synthesis of the teacher’s and the students’ dispositions”.

As the years have passed by, it has seemed to me that universities are playing intellectual whack-a-mole, rather than re-examining their foundational beliefs in the light of what they offer and what others may offer better. In the age of Trump and mini-Trump, more than ever, we need that which universities once nurtured and protected. It’s just that they don’t need to do everything, nor are they for everybody, nor are they suited to solving all of humankind’s problems. As had been said before, ask any bloody question and the universal answer is ‘education, education, education’. It isn’t.

That is a longer (and more cathartic) answer to my questions than I had intended. I have chosen not to describe the awful position that most UK universities have found themselves in at the hands of hostile politicians, nor the general cultural assault by the media and others on learning, rigour and nuance. The stench of money is the accelerant of what seeks to destroy our once-modern world. And for the record, I have never had any interest in, or facility for, management beyond that required to run a small research group, and teaching in my own discipline. I don’t doubt that if I had been in charge the situation would have been far worse.

Reading debt

Sydney Brenner, one of the handful of scientists who made the revolution in biology of the second half of the 20th century once said words to the effect that scientists no longer read papers they just Xerox them. The problem he was alluding to, was the ever-increasing size of the scientific literature. I was fairly disciplined in the age of photocopying but with the world of online PDFs I too began to sink. Year after year, this reading debt has increased, and not just with ‘papers’ but with monographs and books too. Many years ago, in parallel with what occupied much of my time — skin cancer biology and the genetics of pigmentation, and computerised skin cancer diagnostic systems — I had started to write about topics related to science and medicine that gradually bugged me more and more. It was an itch I felt compelled to scratch. I wrote a paper in the Lancet   on the nature of patents in clinical medicine and the effect intellectual property rights had on the patterns of clinical discovery; several papers on the nature of clinical discovery and the relations between biology and medicine in Science and elsewhere. I also wrote about why you cannot use “spreadsheets to measure suffering” and why there is no universal calculus of suffering or dis-ease for skin disease ( here and here ); and several papers on the misuse of statistics and evidence by the evidence-based-medicine cult (here and here). Finally, I ventured some thoughts on the industrialisation of medicine, and the relation between teaching and learning, industry, and clinical practice (here), as well as the nature of clinical medicine and clinical academia (here  and here ). I got invited to the NIH and to a couple of AAAS meetings to talk about some of these topics. But there was no interest on this side of the pond. It is fair to say that the world was not overwhelmed with my efforts.

At one level, most academic careers end in failure, or at last they should if we are doing things right. Some colleagues thought I was losing my marbles, some viewed me as a closet philosopher who was now out, and partying wildly, and some, I suspect, expressed pity for my state. Closer to home — with one notable exception — the work was treated with what I call the Petit-mal phenomenon — there is a brief pause or ‘silence’ in the conversation, before normal life returns after this ‘absence’, with no apparent memory of the offending event. After all, nobody would enter such papers for the RAE/REF — they weren’t science with data and results, and since of course they weren’t supported by external funding, they were considered worthless. Pace Brenner, in terms of research assessment you don’t really need to read papers, just look at the impact factor and the amount and source of funding: sexy, or not?⁵

You have to continually check-in with your own personal lodestar; dead-reckoning over the course of a career is not wise. I thought there was some merit in what I had written, but I didn’t think I had gone deep enough into the problems I kept seeing all around me (an occupational hazard of a skin biologist, you might say). Lack of time was one issue, another was that I had little experience of the sorts of research methods I needed. The two problems are not totally unrelated; the day-job kept getting in the way.

(more…)

Patient 3

He was nearer seventy than sixty, and not from one of Edinburgh’s more salubrious neighbourhoods. He sat on the examination couch unsure what to do next. His right trouser was leg rolled up, exposing a soiled bandage crusted with blood that had clearly been there for more than a few days. He nodded as I walked into the clinic room and I introduced myself with a shake of his hand. This was pre-covid.

I knew his name because that was typed on the clinic list alongside the code that said he was a ‘new’¹ patient, but not much else. Not much else because his clinical folder contained sticky labels giving his name, address, date of birth and health care number only. That was it. As has become increasingly the norm in the clinic room, you ask the patient if they know why they are here.

He had phoned the hospital four days earlier, he said, and he was very grateful that he had been given an appointment to see me. He thanked me as though I was his saviour. If true, I didn’t know from what or from whom. If he was a new patient he would have seen his GP and there should be a letter from his GP in his notes. But no, he hadn’t seen his GP for over a year. Had I seen him before? No, he confirmed, but he had seen another doctor in the very same department about eighteen months previously. I enquired further. He said he had something on his leg — at the site of the distinctly un-fresh bandage — that they had done something to. It had now started to bleed spontaneously. He had phoned up on several occasions, left messages and, at least once, spoken to somebody who said they would check what had happened and get back to him. ‘Get back to you’ is often an intention rather than an action in the NHS, so I was not surprised when he said that he had heard nothing back. His leg was now bleeding and staining his trousers and bed clothes, hence the bandage. He thought that whatever it had been had come back.

Finally, four days before this appointment day, after he relayed his story one more time over the phone, he had been given this appointment. He again told me again how grateful he was to me for seeing him. And no, he didn’t know what diagnosis had been made in the past. I asked him had he received any letters from the hospital. No, he replied. Could he remember the name of any of the doctors he had seen over one year previously? Sadly, not. Had he been given an appointment card with a consultant’s name on? No.

There was a time when nursing and medicine were complementary professions. At one time the assistant who ushered him into the clinic room would have removed the bandage from his leg. In my clinical practice, those days ended long ago. I asked him if he would unwrap the bandage while I went in search of our admin staff to see if they knew more than me about why he was here.

He had been seen before, just as he had said, around eighteen months earlier. He had seen an ‘external provider’, one of a group of doctors employed via commercial agencies who are contracted to cope with all the patients that the regular staff employed by the hospital are unable to see. That demand exceeds supply, is the one feature of the NHS that all agree on, whatever their politics. It outlives all reorganisations. Most of these external provider doctors travel up for weekends, staying in a hotel for one or more nights, and then fly back home. They get paid more than the local doctors (per clinic), and the agency takes a substantial arrangement fee in addition. This had been the norm for over ten years, and of course makes little clinical or financial sense — except if the name of the game is to be able to shape waiting lists with electoral or political cycles, turning the tap on and off. Usually more off, than on.

The doctors who undertake this weekend work are a mixed bunch. Most of them are very good, but of course they don’t normally work in Scotland, and medicine varies across the UK and Europe, and even between regions within one country. It is not so much the medicine that is very different, but the way that different components of care fit together organisationally that are not constant. This hints at one fault line.

That the external doctors are more than just competent is important for another reason. The clinic lists of the visiting doctors are much busier than those of the local doctors, and are full of new patients rather than patients brought back for review. The NHS and the government consider review appointments as wasteful, and that is why all the targets relate to ‘new’ patients. It’s a numbers game: stack them high, don’t let the patients sit down for too long, and process them. Meet those government targets and move in phase with the next election cycle. Consequently, the external provider doctors are being asked to provide episodic care under time pressure; speed dating rather than maintaining a relationship. For most of the time, nobody who actually works in Edinburgh knows what is going on with the patient. But the patients do live in Edinburgh.

Old timers like me know that one of the reasons why review appointments are necessary is that they are a security net, a back up system. In modern business parlance, they add resilience. Like stocks of PPE. In the case of my man, a return appointment would have provided the opportunity to tell him what the hell was going on and to ensure that all that had actually been planned had been carried out. There is supposed to be a beginning, a middle and an end. There wasn’t.

An earlier letter from an external provider doctor was found. It was a well-written summary of the consultation. The patient had a lesion on his leg that was thought clinically to be pre-malignant. The letter stated that if a diagnostic biopsy confirmed this clinical diagnosis — it did — then the patient would require definitive treatment, most likely, surgical. The problem was that in this informal episodic model, the original physician was not there to act on the result; nor to observe that the definitive surgical treatment had not taken place because review appointments are invisible in terms of targets. They are wasteful.

Even before returning to the clinic room, without sight of anything but the blood stained bandage, I knew what was going on. His pre-malignant lesion had, over the period of ‘wasteful’ time, transformed into full-blown cancer. He now had a squamous cell carcinoma. His mortality risk had gone from effectively zero to maybe 5%.

I went back to the clinic room, apologised, explained what had gone on and what needed to happen now, and apologised again. The patient picked up on my mixture of frustration, shame and anger, and it embarrasses me to admit that I had somehow allowed him —mistakenly — to imagine that my emotions were a response to something he had said or done. I apologised again. And then he did say something that fired my anger. I cannot remember the whole sentence but a phrase within it stuck: ‘not for the likes of me’. His response to the gross inadequacy of his care was that it was all people like him could expect.

He was not literally the last patient in dermatology I saw, but his story was the one that told me I had to get out. When a pilot or an airline engineer says that an aircraft is safe to fly there is an unspoken bond between passengers and those who dispense a professional judgement. But this promise is also made by one human to another human. I call it the handshake test, which is why I always shook hands when I introduced myself to patients. This judgement that is both professional and personal has to be compartmentalised away from the likes of sales and marketing, the share price — and government targets or propaganda. This is no longer true of the NHS. The NHS is no longer a clinically led organisation, rather, it is a vehicle for ensuring one political gang or another gains ascendancy over the other at the next election.  It is not so much about money, as about control. True, if doctors went down with the plane, in this metaphor, there would be a much better alignment of incentives. Doctors might be yet more awkward. Better still, we might think about where we seat the politicians and their NHS commissars.

Most doctors keep a shortlist of other doctors who they think of as exceptional. These are the ones they would visit themselves or recommend to family. If I had to rank my private shortlist, I know who would come number one. She is not a dermatologist, but a physician of a different sort, and she works far away from Edinburgh. She has been as loyal and tolerant of the NHS as anybody I know — much more than me. Yet she retired  before me, and her reasoning and justification were as insightful and practical as her medical abilities. Simply put, she could no longer admit her patients and feel able to reassure them that the care they would receive would be safe. It’s the handshake test.

I don’t shake hands with patients any more.

1. A ‘new’ outpatient is usually a patient you are seeing for the first time, after they have been referred by their GP or another consultant. During this ‘illness episode’, if you see them again, they are a ‘review’ patient. Once they have been discharged from hospital review, they may of course re-enter the system — say many years later —as a ‘new’ patient once more with the same or a different condition. ↩

Link to patient 1

Link to patient 2

Patient 2

It hasn’t happened to me often — maybe on only a handful of occasions — but often enough to recognise it, and dread it. I am talking to a patient, trying to second guess the future — how likely is it that their melanoma might stay away for ever, for instance — and I find myself mouthing words that a voice in my head is warning me I will regret saying. And the voice is not so much following my words but anticipating them, so I cannot cite ignorance as an excuse, nor is it a whisper or unclear in any way, and yet I still charge on. A moment later, regret will set in, and this regret I could share with you at that very moment if you were there with me.

The patient was a young man in his early twenties, who lived with his mother, just the two of them at home. He had dark curly hair, was of average height, and he lived for running. This was Newcastle, in the time of Brendan Foster and Steve Cram. He had been admitted with pyrexia, chest pains and a cough. He had bacterial pneumonia, and although he seemed pretty sick, none of us were worried for him.

After a few days, he seemed no better, and we switched antibiotics. Medics reading this will know why. He started to improve within a day or so, and we felt we were in charge, pleased with, and confident of our decisions. This was when I spoke with his mother, updating her on his progress. Yes, he had been very ill; yes, we were certain about his diagnosis; and yes, the change of antibiotics and his response was not unexpected. I then said more. Trying to reassure her, I said that young fit people don’t die from pneumonia any more. That was it. All the demons shuttered.

At this time I was a medical registrar and I supervised a (junior) house officer (HO), and a senior house officer (SHO). In turn, my boss was a consultant physician who looked after ‘general medical’ patients, but his main focus was clinical haematology. In those days the norm was for all of a consultant’s patients to be managed on their own team ward. On our ward, maybe half the patients were general medical, and the others had haematological diseases. Since I was not a haematologist, I was solely tasked with looking after the general medical patients, and mostly acted without the need for close supervision (in a way that was entirely appropriate).

One weekend I was doing a brief ‘business’ ward round on a Sunday morning. Our young man with pneumonia was doing well, his temperature had dropped, and he was laughing and joking. We would have been making plans to let him home soon. The only thing of note was that the houseman reported that the patient had complained of some pain in one calf. I had a look and although the signs were at best minimal I wondered whether he could have had a deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Confirmatory investigations for DVTs in those days were unsatisfactory and not without iatrogenic risk, whilst the risks from anticoagulation in a previously fit young man with no co-morbidities are minimal. We started him on heparin.

A few days later he was reviewed on the consultant’s ward round. I knew that the decision to anti-coagulate would (rightly) come under review. The physical signs once subtle were now non-existent, and the anticoagulation was stopped. A reasonable decision I knew, but one that I disagreed with, perhaps more because of my touchy ego than deep clinical judgement.

Every seven to ten days or so I would be the ‘resident medical officer’ (RMO), meaning I would be on call for unselected medical emergencies. Patients might be referred directly to us by their general practitioner, or as ‘walk-ins’ via casualty (ER). In those days we would usually admit between 10 and 15 patients over a 24-hour period; and we might also see a further handful of patients who we judged did not require hospital admission. Finally, since we were resident, we continued to provide emergency medical care to the whole hospital, including our own preexisting patients.

It was just after 8.30am. The night had been quiet, and I was in high spirits as this was the last time I would act as an RMO. In fact, this was to be the last day of me being a ‘medical registrar’. Shortly after, I would leave Newcastle for Vienna and start a career as an academic dermatologist, a career path that had been planned many years before.

The clinical presentation approaches that of a cliché. A patient with or without various risk factors, but who has been ill from one of a myriad of different conditions, goes to the toilet to move their bowels. They collapse, breathless and go into shock. CPR may or may not help. A clot from their legs has broken free, and blocked the pulmonary trunk. Sufficient blood can no longer circuit from the right side of the heart to the left. The lungs and heart are torn asunder.

When the call went out, as RMO, I was in charge. Nothing we did worked. There is a time to stop, and I ignored it. One of my colleagues took the decision. Often with cardiac arrests, you do not know the patient. That helps. Often the call is about a patient who is old and with multiple preexisting co-morbidities. That is easier, too. But I knew this man or boy; and his mother.

That was the last patient I ever saw in general medicine.

[Link to Patient 1]
[Link to Patient 3]

Patient 1 

When I was a medical registrar I did GP locums for a single-handed female GP in Newcastle. Doing them was great fun, and the money — she insisted on BMA rates — was always welcome. Nowadays, without specific training in general practice, you can’t act as a locum as I did then. This is probably for the best but, as ever, regulations always come with externalities, one of which is sometimes a reduction in overall job satisfaction.

I worked as a locum over a three year period, usually for one week at a time, once or twice a year, covering some of the GP’s annual leave. Weekdays were made up of a morning surgery (8.30 to 10.30 or later), followed by house-calls through lunchtime to early afternoon, and then an evening surgery from 4.30 to around 6:30. I also ran a short Saturday morning surgery. Within the working day I could usually nip home for an hour or so.

From 7pm till the following morning, the Doctors Deputising Service (DDS) took over for emergency calls. They also covered the weekends. The DDS employed other GPs or full-time freelancers. Junior hospital doctors often referred to the DDS as the Dangerous Doctor Service. Whether this moniker was deserved, I cannot say, but seeing patients you don’t know in unfamiliar surroundings is often tricky. Read on.

Normally, the GP would cover the nights herself, effectively being on call 24 hours per day, week in, week out. Before she took leave, she used to proactively manage her patients, letting some of her surgery ‘specials’ or ‘regulars’ know she would be away, and therefore they might be better served by waiting for her to return. Because she normally did her own night-calls, she was aware of how a small group of patients might request night visits that might be judged to be unnecessary. I think the fee the DDS charged to her was dependent on how often a visit was requested, so, as far as was reasonable, she tried to ensure her patients knew that when she was away they would only get a visit from a ‘stranger’ — home night-time call-outs should be for real emergencies. I got the strong impression that her patients were very fond of her, and she of them. Without exception, they were always very welcoming to me, and I loved the work. Yes I got paid, but it was fun medicine, and offered a freedom that you didn’t feel in hospital medicine as a junior (or senior) doctor.

The last occasion I undertook the locum was eventful. I knew that this was going to be the last occasion, as that summer I was moving on from internal medicine to start training in dermatology — leaving for Vienna in early August. A request for a house-call, from forty-year-old man with a headache, came in just as the Friday evening surgery was finishing, a short while after 6.30pm. My penultimate day. I had been hoping to get off sharpish, knowing I would be doing the Saturday morning surgery, but contractually I was covering to 7pm, so my plan was to call at the patient’s house on the way home.

I took his clinical paper notes with me. There was virtually nothing in them, a fact that doctors recognise as a salient observation. He lived, as did most of the surgery’s patients, on a very respectable council estate that literally encircled the surgery. I could have walked, but chose to drive, knowing that since I had locked up the surgery, I could go straight home afterwards.

When I got to his house, his wife was standing outside, waiting for me. She was most apologetic, informing me that her husband was not at home, but had slipped out to take his dog for a walk. I silently wondered why if this was the case, he couldn’t have taken the dog with him to the surgery, saving me a trip. No matter. Grumbling about patient behaviour is not unnatural, but is often the parent of emotions that can cloud clinical judgement. There lie dragons.

The patient’s wife ran to the local park to find her husband, who, in tow with her and the dog, came running at a fair pace back to the house a few minutes later. The story was of a headache on one side of his head, posterior to the temple, that had started a few hours earlier. The headache was not severe, he told me, and he felt well; he didn’t think he had flu. His concern was simply because he didn’t normally get headaches. There was nothing else remarkable about his history; he was not on any medication, and had no preexisting complaints or diseases beyond the occasional cold. Nor did the actual headache provide any diagnostic clues. On clinical examination, he was apyrexial, with a normal pulse and blood pressure, and a thorough neuro exam (as in that performed by somebody who had recently done a neuro job) was normal. No neck stiffness or photophobia and the fundi were visualised and clear. The best I could do was wonder about a hint of erythema on his tympanic membrane on the side of the headache, but there was no local tenderness, there. I worried I was making the signs fit the story.

I told him I couldn’t find a good explanation for his headache, and that my clinical examination of him was essentially normal. There was a remote possibility that he had a middle ear infection, although I said that since he had no history of previous ear infections, this seemed unlikely. I opted to give him some amoxycillin (from my bag) and said that whilst night-time cover would be provided by the DDS, I would be holding a surgery on the Saturday morning in just over 12 hours time. Should he not feel right, he should pop in to see me, or I could visit him again. He and his wife thanked me for coming round, I went home and, as far as I knew, that was the end of the story of my penultimate day as a locum GP. He did not come to my Saturday morning surgery.

Several weeks later, when I was back doing internal medicine and on call for urgent GP referrals, the same GP phoned me up about another of her patients who she thought merited hospital assessment. This was easily sorted, and I then asked her about some of the patients of hers I had seen when I was her locum. There was one in particular, with abdominal pain, whom I had sent into hospital, and I wanted to know what had happened to him. She then told me that the patient had meningitis. There was a moment of confusion: we were not talking about the same patient.

The story of the man with the headache was as follows. I had seen him just before 7pm, apyrexial, fully conscious, with a normal pulse and blood pressure, and no neuro signs. By 8pm his headache was much more severe and his wife put a call into the DDS who saw him before 9pm, but could not find anything abnormal. By 10.30pm he was barely conscious, and his wife called the DDS who were going to be delayed. Soon after, she dialled 999. He was admitted and diagnosed and treated for bacterial meningitis. The GP told me he had made a prompt and complete recovery.

That was the last patient I ever saw in general practice.

[Link to patient 2]

[Link to patient 3]

Nicely put

Capitalism on the way up, and socialism on the way down is cronyism.

Corona Corps + Biden | No Mercy / No Malice

“I have been this close to buying a nursing school.” This is not a sentence you expect to hear from a startup founder. Nursing seems a world away from the high-tech whizziness of Silicon Valley. And, to use a venture-capital cliché, it does not scale easily.

This was from an article in the Economist awhile back. As ever, there is a mixture of craziness and novelty. The gist of the article is about Lambda School, a company that matches ‘fast’ training with labour force shortages (hence the nursing angle). When I first read it, I had thought they had already opened a nursing school, but that is not so. Nonetheless, there are aspects that interest me.

We learn that

1. Full-time students attend for nine months, five days a week from 8am to 5pm. Latecomers risk falling behind, but for most classes, 85% of students who began a course finish. Study is online but ‘live’ (rather than pre-recorded videos). These completion rates are a lot higher than for many community colleges in the US.
2. Lambda only gets paid after its students have landed a job which pays them more than $50,000 a year. Around 70% of those enrolled do so within six months of graduation. Lambda then receives about a sixth of their income for the next two years, until they have paid about $30,000 (or they could pay £20,000 up front).
3. One third of the costs are spent on finding jobs for graduates, another third on recruitment and only one third on the actual teaching. Scary.

The Economist chimes in with the standard “Too often students are treated as cash cows to be milked for research funding.” Too true, but to solve this issue we need to massively increase research costings, have meaningful conversations with charities and government (including the NHS) about the way students are forced to involuntarily subsidise research, and cut out a lot of research in universities that is the D of R&D.

But this is not a sensible model for a university. On the other hand it is increasingly evident to me that universities are not suitable places to learn many vocational skills. The obvious immediate problem for Lambda is finding and funding a suitable clinical environment. That is exactly the problem that medical (or dental) schools face. A better model is a sequential one, one which ironically mimics the implicit English model of old: university study, followed by practical hospital clerkships. Just tweak the funding model to allow it.

I have rich memories of general practice, and I mean general practice rather than primary care ¹. My earliest memories centre around a single-handed GP, who looked after my family until we left Wales in the early 1970s. His practice was in his house, just off Whitchurch village in Cardiff. You entered by what once may have been the back gate or tradesman’s entrance. Around the corner and a few steps up, you found the waiting room. Originally, I guess, it might have been a washroom or utility room for a maid or housekeeper. By the standards of the Rees abode the house was large.

The external door to the waiting room was opposite the door into the main part of the doctor’s house, and on the adjacent sides were two long benches. They were fun for a little boy to sit on because since your legs couldn’t touch the floor, you could shuffle along as spaces became available. When you did this adults tended to smile at you; I now know why. If you were immobile for too long your thighs might stick to the faux-leather surface; pulling them away fast resulted in a fart like noise, although in those days I was too polite to think out loud.

Once you were called — whether it was by the doctor or his wife I cannot remember— you entered his ‘rooms’. The consulting rooms was by my preferred unit measure — how far I could kick a ball — large, with higher ceilings than we had at home. The floorboards creaked and the carpet was limited to the centre of the room. If there was a need for privacy there was what seemed like a fairly inadequate freestanding curtained frame. For little boys, obviously, no such cover was deemed necessary.

I can remember many home visits: two stand out in particular, mumps, and an episode of heavily infected eczema where my body was covered in thousands of pustules, and where I remember pulling off sheets of skin that had stuck to the bedclothes. The sick-role was respected in our home: if you were ill and off school you were in bed. Well, almost. Certainly, no kicking the ball against the wall.

Naturally, the same GP would look after any visitors to my home. Although my memories are influenced by what my mother told me, on one occasion my Irish grandmother’s valvular heart failure decompressed when she was staying with us (her home was in Dublin). More precisely, I was turfed out of my bed, so she could occupy it. The GP phoned the Cardiff Royal Infirmary explaining that the patient needed admission, and would they oblige? The GP however took ten years-or-so off her true age. Once he was off the phone, my mother corrected him. He knew better: if I had told them the truth they would have refused to admit her, he said. (This was general practice, not state medicine, after all). The memory of this event stuck with me when I was a medical student on a geriatrics attachment in Sunderland circa 1981. Only those under 60 with an MI were deemed suitable for admission to the CCU, with the rest left in a large Nightingale ward with no cardiac monitoring ². I thought of my father who was then close to 60.

I was lucky enough to be able to recognise this type of general practice — albeit with many much needed changes — as a medical student in Newcastle, and to be taught by some wonderful GPs, and even do some GP locums when I was a medical registrar. And although I had never met the late and great Julian Tudor-Hart face-to-face, we are linked by a couple of mutual Welsh friends, and we exchanged odd emails over the years.

So, why do I recall all of this? Nostalgia? Yes, I own up to that. But more out of anger that what was unique about UK general practice has been replaced by primary care and “population medicine”, and many patients are worse off because of this shift. Worse still, it now seems all is viewed not through the lens of vocation, but by the egregious ‘its just business’. Continuity of care and “personal doctoring” is, and has been, lost.

I write after being provoked by a comment in the London Review of Books. Responding to a terrific article by John Furse on the NHS, Helen Buckingham of the Nuffield Trust states — as many do — that “The reality is that almost all GP practices are already private businesses, and have been since the founding of the NHS.” (LRB 5/12/2019 page 4).

Well, for me, this is pure sophistry. There are businesses and businesses. If you wish, you might call the Catholic Church a business, or Edinburgh university a business, or even the army a business. You might even refer to each of them as a corporation. But to do so, misses all those human motivations that make up civil society. Particularly the ability to look people in the eye and not feel grimy. There is no way on earth that the GP who looked about me would have called what he did a business. Nor was he part of any corporation. And the reason is simple: like many think tanks, many modern corporations — especially the larger ones — have no sense of morality beyond the dollar of the bottom line³, often spending their undoubted skills wilfully arbitraging the imperfections of regulation and honest motivation. It does not have to be this way.

1. Here I am echoing the arguments made by Howie, Metcalfe and Walker in the BMJ in 2008: The State of General Practice — not all for the better. Comments on this article effectively said: the halcyon days of general practice were over. Get used to it! I am not convinced. What has happened is that ‘government led population / public health’ has gobbled up ‘personal doctoring’. For the latter, it appears, you will need more than the NHS. ↩
2. Many epidemiologists argued that there was no need for CCUs as no RCTs had shown their benefit. Ditto for parachutes, renal transplantation , no doubt. ↩
3. You can insert your own favourite de jour: Pfizer and Flynn for raising the price of an anti-epilepsy drug by up to 2,600 per cent, or GSK, or Crapita, Test and Trace etc. The list goes on, well before we get to the likes of Facebook or the Financial Services Industry

I have previously commented on Abraham Flexner on this site. The Flexner report is the most influential review of US medical education ever published, although some would argue that the changes it recommended were already working their way through the system. For a long time I was unaware of another project of his, an article with the title The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge ¹. For me, there are echoes of Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness and the fact that Flexner’s essay was published at the onset of World War 2 adds anther dimension to the topic.

As for medical education, the ever-growing pressure is to teach so much that many students don’t have time to learn anything. I wish some other comments from Flexner opened any GMC dicta on what a university medical education should be all about.

“Now I sometimes wonder,” he wrote, “whether there would be sufficient opportunity for a full life if the world were emptied of some of the useless things that give it spiritual significance; in other words, whether our conception of what is useful may not have become too narrow to be adequate to the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.”

1. The essay originally published in Harper’s Magazine was republished with a companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf by Princeton University Press in 2017. ↩

Inside the Leviathan

“I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.”

John Maynard Keynes, 1917, in a letter to Duncan Grant.

The above quote via John Naughton who commented

I wonder how many officials in the US and UK governments currently feel the same way.

Following on from the previous post, here is a bit more economics, surely germane to Deaton and Case’s work, and which provides yet another example of where the ‘observation’ (‘facts’) may, if not shout for themselves, at least whisper that something important is going on. The graphs are from Saez and Zucman’s The Triumph of Injustice. Note the timeline for each graph.