Guess which type of doctor is most likely to be sued? Go on.
Here's the truth: your treatment is only as good as the doctor who gives it to you. Really. You hear some terrifying tales of people whose obvious symptoms have been completely ignored by the tunnel-visioned medic riding his personal hobby-horse in front of them. A friend's mother, for instance, felt a ghastly pop one day somewhere inside and started leaking pus from her urethra. Lots of pus. Enough that she was having to wear sanitary towels. Not nice. So her doctor referred her to a gynecologist. The gynecologist, having poked about, couldn't find anything wrong with her. Gynecologically. So what did he do? He gave her a clean bill of health, that's what. Which meant that she dropped out of the system, failed to get the obvious referrals she needed and had to go back to her doctor who, having had a letter saying she had a clean bill of health, had, obviously, assumed that the problem had been sorted. Did she sue? Go on, guess.
Specialists are amazing people. They often fail to see wood for trees. That's why your lowly doctor is so essential to your overall wellbeing. Our practice, fortunately, is a good one. Not perfect - it's staffed by human beings, after all, not robots - but good, especially since Dr Death retired a couple of years ago. At seventy, he was very much of the Don't-Bother-The-Specialists school, and didn't believe in Mental Health unless someone was actually waving a knife about and babbling about Jesus. He was good at getting people into hospices, though.
Since Dr Death left, out practice is essentially made up of the Spice Docs. There are five of them, as you might expect, and the really do break down into Scary, Sporty, Posh, Baby and Ginger, each with their own foibles and each with their own strengths. But guess which one - we've not been sued yet, but we do hear patient moans from time to time - rates highest on the grumble-o-meter?
Sporty, for instance, nags everyone about exercise. This is, of course, in harmony with government policy, but she takes it to the extreme of zealotry. You can't go in for a passport endorsement without her cross-questioning you about how much time you spend jogging every week.
Posh is the Doc-Most-Requested by the people who live in the big Victorian houses that face the common. She understands all about ski-ing injuries and allaying fears about the MMR vaccine and is good at spotting macrobiotic malnutrition, but is less good on Rottweiller bites and damp-related lung infections.
Baby replaced Doctor Death. Four years out of Med school, he is still very, very enthusiastic and gets very excited. He is generally unpopular with the over-50s, though; because of his habit of Googling their symptoms in front of them. The world is still divided between those who think that knowledge not readily accessed from the head is useless and those who understand the value of reference sources.
Ginger came from Glasgow. He has the foxy hair, blond eyebrows and tattie-fed complexion that puts our baseball-cap-wearing clientele with the built-in bum-bags at ease. Trouble is, his old Harris Tweed jacket, which I think only gets an annual dry-clean, stinks of fag smoke, and occasionally, especially in the afternoon surgeries, I have to give him a breath mint to cover the smell of his lunch, if you see what I mean.
And then there's Scary. Scary is Scary because she is, without doubt, the cleverest person I've ever met. Lots of doctors are of the good-at-exams type, but Scary, with her half-moon specs and her steely-grey hair and her air of faint disdain, is clearly a cut above those. She's a demon at diagnosis and is the most efficient of all our doctors. In half the allotted 15-minute consultation time, most of her patients will emerge clutching a prescription - or not, of course, because she doesn't waste money or resources on the useless dissemination of antibiotics for viral problems. Generally speaking, if you get treated by Scary Doc, you stay treated.
So which one gets the most grumbles? Well, Scary, of course. And it's not that surprising. Research by insurers in the US, where litigation is far more of a problem than it is here, shows that, in terms of the likelihood of a surgeon being sued, it doesn't matter how good their statistics are: if their bedside manner's out, if they fail to take time to explain things, or fail to look their patient in the eye properly, their chances of getting trouble later on are infinitely higher than those of the superannuated old quack who holds your hand and give you a bit of sympathy for your ailments. You often hear patients going out of here, saying something along the lines of; "I don't know. She just gave me a prescription. That's the trouble with doctors these days, they just don't take the time, do they?" Go figure.
When my friend's mum told me the story of her gynae disaster, I asked her if she'd registered a complaint. "Oh, no, dear," she said, picking up the kettle very gingerly as a result of the stitches from her diverticulitis surgery, "no point grumbling, is there?"
"But he should be reprimanded, at the very least," I countered. "Oh, I know, dear," she said, "but he was such a nice man. So gentle. And he made a real effort to make sure he warmed up his hands."
(Catch up on the most recent happenings in the waiting room.)
Waiting Room