While far more experienced BMA chiefs struggled to find the words, it took two young GPs to provide an appropriate response to the health secretary’s ‘new deal’ for general practice, and Dr Farah Jameel was one of them.
Seconding an ‘emergency rider’ motion at the BMA’s Annual Representatives Meeting in June – proposed by Dr Amy Small – Dr Jameel memorably told the meeting that the so-called new deal would create ‘a service made up of exhausted, burnt-out, hamster-wheel doctors running a piecemeal, haphazard sort of service, putting patients at risk’.
And the motion declaring the ‘new deal’ a risk to patient safety and the ‘very existence of general practice’ was passed, stiffening the BMA’s line on the health secretary’s speech and showing that although Dr Jameel only qualified as a GP in 2013, she is already becoming a powerful voice on the GPC.
Explaining the thinking behind this, Dr Jameel says: ‘It was really important for the profession to be clear that Jeremy Hunt’s “new deal” for general practice was indeed not really a deal at all.’
When she’s not taking on the health secretary, the London GP is a recent addition to Camden LMC and was nominated by her peers for being ‘a great role model for diverse leadership in general practice’.
She was elected deputy chair of the BMA Equality and Inclusion Committee this year and is also a council member of the Medical Women’s Federation.
And congratulations are in order – Dr Jameel got married just last month.
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