Owen Jones asks one for whom, going into the healthcare system, should you expect to find extra emotion and commitment: the children. That may not be a surprise; for me it was the best first thing I ever read about medicine; for Dr Fiona Coleman, (revealingly, as she’s about to become a career paediatrician), the topic immediately dominated her first sabbatical at the child hospital in Sunderland. And she was adamant about the state of kids’ healthcare in the UK.
For parents, this was news. The system was once widely regarded as state of the art, with a reputation for getting right the basic things, working well with parents and keeping costs low. Much has changed since then: dwindling budgets in general, a young population, the recent pandemic and the change in the balance of power between GPs and hospital clinicians.
Professor Gifford says there is already concern about how hospitals operate. If you are a doctor in hospital, it can be daunting to build up your skills. In Dr Coleman’s view, this will see kids going into the more traumatic situations as people with lower “cardiovascular awareness”. Back in the days when you’d end up with someone in A&E who had come to hospital on an NHS ambulance, at least you knew where you were, Gifford argues, if only to the professionals who saw you in the end. Now “everyone is trained as a scientist and they are rarely taught what you do”, Coleman notes. Indeed, Gifford suggests we should stop referring to A&E simply as “hospital” or “hospitals” and call them “institutes” instead. That’s brave to be sure.