Why I Resigned from My Job as a GP

Video Transcript:

Among the many lies about me on the web, there's one claiming that I left the health service and stopped being a doctor in practice. After my first book, The Medicine Men was published. The book was about the relationship between the medical profession and the drug industry, and I'm not promoting it because it's been out of print for decades. If the people who make this stuff up bothered to do any research or cared about the truth, they'd know that that particular claim is nonsense. The Medicine Men was published in 1975, and I received a massive advance of 750 pounds to write it. It wasn't actually the greatest financial success of anybody's life. The type is to work on the TypeScript, charge me 800 pounds to type it, and the insurers from which I bought libel insurance charge me 700 pounds. I had some money for foreign rights and paperback rights, but the book was never going to take me off to the Bahamas on a huge yacht. It wasn't intended to do that. It was a book about the relationship between the medical profession and the drug industry, which even back in 1975 worried me enormously. What the idiots on the web also didn't realise was that I didn't resign as a GP until seven or eight years after that book came out. The fact is that being a GP was always the job I wanted to do, and one that I enjoyed a great deal. In those distant years, GPs were responsible for their patients in the UK for 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. So that we had some time off, most doctors worked in informal groups of four or five. Often the association was a pretty loose one in the individual GPs and these run their practices independently and merely shared their out-of-hours responsibilities. It all worked surprisingly well and easily. If there were five doctors sharing their night-time weekend and bank holiday calls, then each one of the five would be on call one night a week and one weekend in five. It wasn't particularly onerous, but it meant that patients got 24 hours a day cover 365 days a year. At the end of each day, a doctor who was looking after a patient with a specific problem would often ring the doctor who was on call and tell him if he was likely to call out to see that patient. This is X as a bad chest infection, but I think she's responding to the antibiotic the doctor might say, if a husband calls, he might have to get her into hospital. That's sort of thing. To be honest, I never particularly minded out-of-hours calls. Indeed, for me the best bit of being a GP was driving back home at four o'clock in the morning, having spent an hour treating a patient at home. It might have been an asthmatic having a severe trouble breathing, nearing intravenous injections or a child screaming with pain from a near infection. Of course, the glow of satisfaction might dim slightly if when I got back home I found there was another call to be done because if there was it would inevitably be in a house in the next street to the one I just left. There were no mobile phones in those days of course. After a night on call we still did morning surgery of course, and there was sometimes... that was sometimes a little tiring. I wasn't the only GP to fall asleep in his consultant room. So why, after just 10 years did I give up my dream job? It was the paperwork, the bureaucracy and the non-senses which defeated me. One of a GP's tasks was to sign signals, and the law required doctors to put the diagnosis on the form. The patient then took the form to their employer. Inevitably, this meant that everyone in the office knew what the patient's problem was. One of my patients was the manager of the local branch of a big chain store. He came into see me one day and it wasn't difficult to see the problem. He was severely depressed, worn down by demanding bosses and a difficult job. He needed some time off work. After we talked for a while I reached for the sick note, Paa described his name and address, and wrote, depression in the box requiring a diagnosis. Do you have to put that down? He asked. I looked at him, puzzled. If my boss sees that, I'll be fired, he told me. I ripped up the form and wrote another. On this one I scribbled, virus infection. A couple of days later a young woman came to see me, she was pregnant and was suffering from morning sickness. Do you mind not putting down the time pregnant, she asked, when I was writing out her sick note? The girls at work don't know, but I have to hand the form into my boss. She had a virus infection too. After that I just gave up and all the sick notes I signed contained the same diagnosis. A scribbled, virus infection. After a few weeks of this I was hauled before a local NHS committee. They had a sheaf of the sick notes I had signed. All the forms have the same diagnosis. To cut a long story short they find me a couple hundred quid and threatened to do it again and again and again and again. If I didn't write down proper diagnoses every time I wrote a sick note for a patient. Two hundred quid was a lot of money in those days and I was pretty well sure that I was going to end up spending a day a week in a committee room being told off for having tried to protect my patients. So I resigned from my job as a GP and became a professional writer. Shortly afterwards I'm pleased to say the rules were changed and patients were allowed to write their own sick notes. You won't find that on the web. I'm supposed to have resigned after I wrote the myths and then seven years or so earlier. Thanks for watching me and thanks for your support and encouragement. Please copy and share the videos on Twitter and Facebook from which I'm curiously banned. And if you want to put on a translation that's fine. If my videos disappear just go along to the website www.vernancormon.com where there should be a little message saying where I've disappeared to hopefully. Thanks for watching an old man in a chair. I haven't authorized any advertising and there's no sponsorship. If you want to see more videos please subscribe to my channel because the videos aren't always easy to find. Thanks again for watching.