RCGP William Pickles Lecture 2017: A new kind of doctor.

Abstract

For the last decade, I’ve been a doctors’ doctor, leading a confidential service for doctors with mental health problems, the Practitioner Health Programme (www.php.nhs.uk). In caring for my own kind, I’ve tried to understand why I’m seeing growing numbers of mentally ill doctors. I will suggest, as Julian Tudor Hart did in the 1980s,1 that we need to train ‘A new kind of doctor’. During my life, three GPs have been important influences. The first is my father. An immigrant to the UK in the 1960s, he was a single-handed GP in the East of England. Our home was his surgery; our front room doubled as the patients’ waiting room and our dining room as his consulting room. From an early age, I saw first hand the relationship my Dad had with his patients. His dedication, his authority — and his love. When I was a young girl, he would take me with him on home visits — and I was enthralled as he explained what the house call was all about. He enthused me with a love of medicine and, more importantly, a love of general practice. The second is William Pickles, the first president of the RCGP. Pickles was the archetypal family doctor.2 He too lived above the shop — in the doctor’s house with his practice partner, an old friend from medical school. Like my father, he was known for his kindness and knowledge of his patients. By the time he died, at the end of the 1960s, he’d already become part of general practice’s mythology. To these two I add a third, Dr John Sassall, who was the protagonist of John Berger’s 1967 book A Fortunate Man: the Story of a Country Doctor .3 Sassall worked in the Forest of Dean, and, in …