Page 15 - IDF Journal 2023

Specialist Committee’s Report
Dr Glyn Towlerton
Chair,
IDF Specialist Committee
I was reminded the other
day of an evolutionary term stolen from Lewis Carroll, “The Red Queen hypothesis.” It describes having to run faster to stay still. This seems a similar predicament to
the lives of the modern-day physician.
I have taken over this role
as Chair of the Specialist Committee, ably stewarded by Sean Preston through COVID-19. There are a number of opportunities and challenges facing us, but this is a call to arms. Without expending effort, time and some costs, we will not achieve anything better for ourselves or our patients.
We have the nucleus of a great team, in Sean Preston whose continued advice has been outstanding, David Houlihan- Burne, who continues to liaise with the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN), and Christian Barnick liaising with the Federation of Independent Practitioner Organisations (FIPO).
If you would like to contribute, change and help bring your innovation, energy and ideas to bear, then please let us know.
We have returned to, as it were, ‘business as usual’, after the pandemic, where many of us had thrown our hearts, minds and muscle behind helping the NHS
deal with this once in a lifetime crisis. Seeing how the goodwill of our fellow medical practitioners can be coalesced into something amazing and heart- warming that one could be proud to be a part of, reminds all of us that you can still get a kick out of medicine. However, as we have hit the ground running back to normal practice, we seem to have
to run even faster to keep up with the non-medical aspects of the day job - revalidation, rising costs, ‘independent’ invoice agency, indemnity, increasing legal actions, threats of incarceration if you get it wrong, threats of reducing returns if
you get it right. Many of us, I suspect, are taking time to think.
It strikes me that the downward pressures have likely stifled the innovation that improves patient care and reduced the plurality of availability to patients. Whilst metrics to show these are difficult, as
so much of good medical practice is subjective, heterogeneous, and does not lend itself well to being counted, I am sure we all consider these as self-evident truths.
How we can facilitate better practice will only become apparent if we, as a group, engage our hearts and minds. There
are now over a thousand specialists within the IDF and we should use this collective hive to pursue our goals as well as to provide answers to practical and ethical questions. One issue might be
the recognition of what medical inflation is, another might be deciding what are reasonable medical annual cost increases to maintain practice excellence. These are for you to decide - let us know.
However, we can do nothing without engagement and whilst we continue to support individual consultants who are challenged (usually over their fees), we need wider engagement to produce anything meaningful for the profession.
Thinking of another literary giant, that old Barts anaesthetist, Richard Gordons’ ebullient surgeon, Sir Lancelot Sprat asked: ‘What’s the bleeding time, man?’ Well is now the time to engage as a group?
If you would like to contribute, change and help bring your innovation, energy and ideas to bear, then please let us know.
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