What planet are the GMC on? The public haven’t lost faith and trust in doctors, they have lost faith in the institution known as the NHS. Stop hounding the shop floor workers and start turning your powers to the structures and cultures that foster good practice and the drivers to improve our individual and collective development and improvement. The GMC needs to stop focussing on individuals and their human weaknesses, and concentrate on the factors that make and break good healthcare teams.
That doctor you are investigating is part of a larger picture – a multitude of factors influence their abilities and functioning in any given scenario, personal, professional, environmental, structural, cultural (working culture, not religious). A final result has many roots.
Stop pandering to simplistic populist views about the importance of individual practitioners’ transparency and accountability, further compounding the public’s confusion about what makes good healthcare, whilst battering the confidence and judgement of compassionate, hardworking, intelligent human beings, and simultaneously feeding the unrealistic expectations of an increasingly anxious society.
The GMC needs to step back, look at the whole picture, not just the individual pixels, and help rebuild the culture of compassion, trust and mutual understanding that will heal this broken healthcare system.
I call on the GMC to stop being part of the problem and become part of the solution.
