Druin Burch is a consultant physician, a former junior doctor, and the author of books on history and medicine.
From our UK edition
Junior doctors have voted to extend their strikes – by a whisker. Turnout for yesterday’s vote collapsed to less than 53 per cent – a whisker above the threshold needed to make it legal. Framed as a pay dispute, the strikes are the result of a needlessly ruined career structure, and a government perversely willing
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By the calendar it is winter, but the days are longer and the birds are singing. Snowdrops are scattered around the front door, and crocuses have already broken through on my lawn. Mostly they are slim and pale, but when the sun has shone they have opened their purple cups to its warmth. Virginia Woolf
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Tesla’s last quarterly report revealed that deliveries had declined for the second year running and, for the first time, annual revenues had fallen. “It is starting to look as if Tesla is finished,” concluded a piece in The Spectator. To what extent Musk will succeed can’t be known, but his track record demands thoughtful uncertainty at
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Lego – I can’t bring myself to capitalise it more than once – was born today in 1958, when it was granted its Danish patent. Parents have been performing staccato hops over the plastic bricks ever since. I will not be alone in remembering a Lego set as being an object of endless desire. As
A patient, an old woman with white hair, stripped of speech by dementia, followed us each shift, staying an inch behind, wanting nothing more than human presence. We let her into the staff room, where she hovered behind whoever was nearest, her tattooed number visible on her forearm. They found a young girl, Doris, who
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‘We will tread more lightly on your lives,’ promised Keir Starmer in his first speech as Prime Minister. Yet his government has not lifted the weight of the state in their 18 months of power but made it more intrusive. Today, as part of a new road safety strategy, Labour is proposing cutting the drink-drive
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Of all the months to choose for abstinence, January seems the strangest. May is intoxicating by itself; winter, when life feels threatened by the silent ministry of frost, needs cheer. Christmas and New Year are past, the birds are already singing loudly in the early mornings, snowdrops push up their green fuses, hellebores grow fresh
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Christmas is now a festival of family and overeating, yet it keeps its pockets of quiet reflection, even for those for whom the sacred has slipped away. There are times when life insists we do nothing, and some come at Christmas. Holidays bring downtime, moments when work and parties, preparations and cleaning, computer games and
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In 1946, buoyed by post-War optimism, the World Health Organisation adopted a famous definition. Health, it declared, was more than the mere absence of disease or infirmity, it was ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’. A beautiful and tyrannical idea, sentimentally idealistic and setting an impossible standard for human lives. In these
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That time of year thou mayst in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.In me thou see’st the twilight of such dayAs after sunset fadeth in the west,Which by and by black night doth take away,Death’s second
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Each winter our NHS is struck by an ‘unprecedented’ number of cases of seasonal illness. Politicians talk gravely of the hard work done by our doctors and nurses, and ask the public to do what they can to help. Newspapers and scientists describe the influx of cases in meteorological terms – a ‘surge’, a ‘wave’,
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Micheál Martin, Ireland’s Taoiseach, said he is shocked by the anti-Semitic slaughter on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, is shocked too. So is Christopher Luxon, the prime minister of New Zealand. Yet there is really nothing shocking about the Australian attack. Insanity, as the saying goes, is
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Mulled wine and Heckler & Koch assault rifles don’t belong together, except in Christmas films like Die Hard. Festive visitors to Christmas markets in Berlin, London or Strasbourg this year will notice the pairing all the same. Concrete blocks surround fairy lights, and the scent of cloves and cinnamon wafts over armed police carrying submachine guns.
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When Columbus brought chilli back from the New World, the British were indifferent. Strange, really, when our taste for horseradish and mustard was keen, and when we later found a love for Marmite, stilton and Pickled Onion Monster Munch. A culture shaped by drizzle should have been an early adopter. Instead, that part of our
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‘Nothing prepared me,’ said Baroness Amos as she released her ‘reflections and initial impressions’ about England’s maternity and neonatal services, ‘for the scale of unacceptable care that women and families have received, and continue to receive, the tragic consequences for their babies, and the impact on their mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.’ Amos’s words today
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These days I barely know what my own handwriting looks like; about my friends, the knowledge is all but lost. Seeing their pen strokes has grown rare. But, for a brief period each winter, that odd intimacy returns as Christmas cards – some with messages, most with just a scribbled name – land on my
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‘Moaning Minnies’ is how the Health Secretary Wes Streeting has described GPs opposing his rollout of online appointment booking. Originally, that moniker referred to German artillery pieces – and it’s pleasant for a doctor like myself to imagine we still possess that sort of firepower. But Streeting meant that the British Medical Association’s GP committee,
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Oh God, another junior doctor strike. That seems to be the feeling of the country and of the junior doctors I’ve spoken to. Certainly it’s the feeling of the consultants, like myself, who will be covering for them. Why the BMA has called another strike is clear. They haven’t got what they wanted, and their
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A research letter in the Future Healthcare Journal, laying out the scale of performance failings in the NHS, has attracted a lot of attention today. It has shone a spotlight on the fact that, to fulfil its pledge to voters to reduce waiting times and ‘fix the NHS’, Labour must somehow find a way to cut
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Gone are the days when I always had a pen in my pocket. Gone are the days when I needed a pen to go to work. The NHS does not now always require a pen, and the NHS is not quick to abandon old technology. Ten years ago I worked in a hospital where a
