It’s a Christmas miracle

Dr David Turner tells the tale of an extraordinary week in general practice during the festive season

Recently, something unusual happened: I was having a pretty good week at work.

The emergency clinic on Monday morning only had three attendees, all of whom had definite bacterial infections that required antibiotics.

The weekly nursing home visit went well. The nurse in charge was well informed about all the residents that needed reviewing, observations had been done, and the relatives seemed to be in accord with the management plans for the patients who lacked capacity.

The midweek in-house teaching was well received. It was a great talk from a secondary care consultant with very GP-centred advice on how to manage problems within the speciality, which was accompanied by a fantastic sponsored lunch by a non-pushy drug rep.

The GP partners’ meeting started with the heart sink-inducing phrase, ‘We have received a letter from a patient…’, but it happily turned out to be a word of thanks to us all for ‘working above and beyond the call of duty’ and ‘providing superb care in the most trying of circumstances on a shrinking budget’. For once, we all left the meeting with big smiles on our faces.

Later in the week, we received a sum of money for uplift that will allow us to give all of our staff a 6% pay rise, with enough left to cover the employers’ NI and pension costs without dipping into practice profits.

Then, as I was sitting in front of my computer having just filed dozens of hospital letters without somehow coming across a single secondary care rejection or workload dump, I decided to reward myself with a quick read through the medical press. I couldn’t believe that the powers that be have decided to make revalidation every 10 years, and appraisal a voluntary process. I mean, I suggested this years ago, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would come true.

After catching up with other news, I scrolled through my inbox and came across an email from the GMC. It seems that in view of the stress doctors experience when undergoing fitness-to-practise investigations, the GMC is raising its burden of proof for negligence cases and will make protecting doctors’ mental and physical health a cornerstone of its mission statement. Who would have thought it, eh?

Things seemed to just keep on getting better. When my evening clinic kicked off, the first few patients all asked me who they should email at NHS England to tell them about the excellent treatment they had received today. But then something unusual occurred: as the last patient entered the room, I felt an icy blast of air accompanied by just the faintest whiff of reindeer dung. I looked up to be greeted by a cheery overweight gentleman sporting an impressive beard and carrying a very large sack.

He dipped his hand into the sack and told me that he had brought me something I had never seen before, and something I would likely never see again. Slowly, he withdrew his gnarled arthritic hand from the sack and handed me a gold-plated unicorn’s horn.

Dr David Turner is a GP in Hertfordshire. Read more of his blogs here