The underlying tension between theory and practice, between head and heart, was dramatically brought home to Chilwell Road last Thursday evening.
A team from the local NHS had booked a hall at church for a well-attended public meeting. The GP who chaired it had shouldered the burden of responsibility for managing the commissioning of specialist services for patients in our town. He outlined the proposed reforms and answered tough questions about cost efficiencies, privatization, and accountability. Patient care got barely a mention.
In another room in church the Ladies’ Circle was meeting. Originally the Wives’ Group, they had adapted to the passing decades with a change of name and gentler topics for discussion. That night they were reminiscing on postal services down the years and showed memorabilia of pillar boxes and postmen’s gear – until a long-standing and faithful member collapsed suddenly in their very midst.
Quick as a flash, our GP was summoned and his audience were left to continue their discussion without him, barely distracted by the comings and goings through the coffee bar nearby; blue lights flashing, paramedics arriving with stretchers and, finally, ladies slowly departing for home. After a few minutes he returned to the hall and quietly concluded his conciliatory and explanatory task.
Unbeknown to the meeting, the GP’s prompt ministrations had been to no avail and our good friend had died. While they had been focussing on the future care of hypothetical individuals grouped by social class and postcode, he had been engaging face-to-face with an actual patient in the ultimate struggle for survival.
I saw there two aspects of the church’s ministry of healing which belong together: both are necessary and both are important. As Christian citizens we engage in both, offering personal care as well as sharing in the responsibility for organising care for the community as a whole. Neither form of care guarantees success in every case: but we do need to put effort into doing our best in both.
For me, the symbolic link between preventive and curative, social and personal was the stethoscope I noticed sticking out of the GP’s pocket at the start of our meeting. The clinician is the crucial link between the patient and the provision of medical care. With practitioners in the centre of the decision-making processes in the NHS, there is surely a good chance that we are all better served as patients.
