Viewpoint

Abstract

I’m 46 now and due something of a midlife crisis, so you’ll forgive me for looking back at my career in general practice and asking how worthwhile it has been. No doubt I’m not the only doctor in the country that looks critically at their performance and sees, rather more readily, one’s weaknesses than their strengths. And yet, as the years go by, there seems to be an ever greater requirement to justify myself, to prove my value. Paradoxically this leaves less time to do valuable things. What’s more, this need to prove myself, as well as being a crushing burden personally, is, I believe, detrimental to my patients since a need to tick boxes all day renders me content to have ticked the boxes rather than to do something that may make a difference. Once, when things didn’t go as we’d have hoped, we talked …