from Phil Peverley in Pulse http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/dr-phil-peverley
As public-sector workers take to the streets, Phil wonders whether GPs will ever join them – and questions whether they should.
It’s 8am on the morning of the Big Strike, and I’m preparing to drive across Sunderland to work. So far, it doesn’t look much different to a normal day.
Admittedly my sons, their school shut for the day, have failed to get dressed and are expressing their solidarity with the protesters from a horizontal position on the sofas in the front room, but this does not strike me as much different from a normal weekend.
‘Why aren’t you on strike, Dad?’ asked my eldest, languidly waving a piece of toast in the air as I prepared myself for another 10-hour shift at the coalface. And it’s not a bad question. Why wasn’t I on strike?
I took his toast off him, and helped myself to a reflective bite. ‘I’ll get back to you on this one, son,’ I advised him, chewing thoughtfully. ‘In the meantime, though, you’d better make yourself another breakfast.’
So why aren’t I on strike? Why haven’t I ever been on strike, and why does even the idea of being on strike at any point strike me as strikingly unlikely?
Firstly and most obviously, there’s the essential absurdity of the self-employed withholding their labour.
Today I could slap a placard to my shoulder and form a picket-line outside my practice.
Tomorrow I’d have no choice but to let twice as many people in, and catch up on all the work I didn’t do today as well as the new stuff. I’m not a nurse or a salaried GP. It’s not as if someone else is going to do my work if I’m not there.
Secondly, in order to go on strike, you need a union that has a policy and principles, and its members’ interests at heart, and which has balloted you in advance and got a mandate.
And all we’ve got is the bloody BMA, which currently seems fixated on setting a minimum price on a unit of alcohol. Bastards. Are their hearts set on removing every vestige of pleasure from my life?
It’s absurd to pretend I entered the medical profession and joined the ranks of my honourable GP colleagues on the back of some sort of implied promise about our pensions. I didn’t. None of you did. No-one thinks about that sort of thing when they’re twenty-odd.
I became a GP because I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do more (well, I could, but Kate Bush didn’t need a masseur at the time). Every day I still wake up wanting to be a GP, and apologies to those of my colleagues who have had enough and can’t stand it any more, but I’m genuinely not in this for the bloody pension.
We GPs are in the business of delivering healthy old people, and I’m sure none of you will disagree with me that we are damn good at it – and, in fact, we have never done it better.
We churn out spry old giffers like there is no tomorrow. But for most of us there, is a tomorrow. That’s the whole point.
So we’re in a cleft stick. The blame for our current financial conundrum lies with those who are no longer in power, and who can’t be brought to account.
A long and healthy old age is what we all want – and while I’d love it to be lavishly funded, the reluctant pragmatist in me can see it won’t come for free. There is no obvious answer – certainly not one that becomes apparent by taking a day off work and waving a sign.
‘Aren’t you on strike today, doctor?’, one patient asked this afternoon.
‘What does it bloody look like?’ I wanted to answer. So I did.
