‘IIF can keep your link worker, when others are losing theirs…’

Pulse PCN’s cover for the Winter 2021 issue had a slightly different take on Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem…

IIF can keep your link worker, when all about you 

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, 

IIF can cause the Daily Mail to doubt and insult you, 

Even more than they currently do; 

IIF can make you wait for funding, and get tired of waiting, 

For the money that may never arrive 

And increase the public hatred, for the riches on offer to GPs, 

Without ever taking into account, the extra work: 

IIF can make you dream – and dash those dreams quickly; 

IIF can make you think about population health; 

IIF can make you do QOF as well 

And treat those two impostors just the same; 

IIF takes a positive vision for general practice, 

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 

As you watch the things you gave your life to, broken, 

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: 

IIF can make you one heap of earnings,  

And risk it on one poorly ticked box, 

And lose your funding, and start again at your beginnings 

With the ICSs deliberately disregarding any word about your loss; 

IIF can force you, your practice nurse and health assistant, 

To serve your practice long after contracted working hours, 

And so to hold on when there is nothing  

Except the knowledge there are so few GPs left, if you can talk with the worried well and keep your virtue, 

Or consult on Teams – for those patients that want it, 

If neither commissioners nor your PCN colleagues can hurt you, 

If all patients count with you, but none too much; 

If you can fill the unforgiving 10 minutes, 

With 60 seconds’ worth of box ticking, 

Yours is the impact fund and everything that’s in it, 

And – what’s more – you’ll be a PCN director, my son!