The Fishwhacker Swindle?

One of the unadulterated delights of working in the NHS is the nagging you’re constantly subject to. Need to empty your bowels at work? Fill in a Defecation Permission Request Form. Don’t have this form? Fill out a Defecation Permission Request Form Request Form. Don’t have a pen with which to fill out the form? Fill out a Ballpoint Request, Excuse and Apology Form. No toilet paper in the loo? That’s too bad, but bog roll is unnecessary as it requires the cutting down of the rain forests and we should all be using bidets instead. No bidets? Have patience, we have to prioritise resources and you don’t seriously want patient care to be compromised just so that you can clean your anus, do you?

The latest round of hectoring and finger-wagging comes wearing the mantle of ‘revalidation’. All general practitioners and hospital consultants now have to undergo this process every five years or so. It involves an avalanche of paperwork, and requires you to indicate whether or not you’re a psychopathic murderer, or, more specifically, to prove that you’re not one. You do this by collecting thank-you cards and letters of endorsement from your patients and colleagues (I’m not making this up); enough of these, it seems, and you must be a swell individual who could never turn out to be another Harold Shipman.

Shipman, for those who don’t know, was a GP who murdered at least 300 of his elderly patients over several decades but committed suicide in prison in January 2004, thus taking the secrets of his motivation with him to the grave. The government seems to have got the idea that he was merely the tip of a murderous iceberg and that doctors are intrinsically dodgy characters (unlike politicians, of course). The whole purpose of the revalidation exercise is to ‘restore public confidence’ in the medical profession. As somebody said in a hilarious but spot-on letter to one of the medical journals last week: why, in the wake of the killing spree by the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, did the government not introduce a revalidation system for lorry drivers (since Sutcliffe drove a truck for a living)? Why not, indeed? There’s no evidence that Shipman’s murderousness had anything to do with his being a doctor, other than that he was afforded a greater opportunity to kill his victims.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Room 101 contains the worst thing in the world. This being my 101st post, I thought I’d do an Orwell tie-in. The worst thing in the world is Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt.