SICKNESS AT THE HEART OF HOSPITALS
Can Medicine Be Cured? Seamus O’Mahony Head of Zeus €28
In 2008, the NHS banned doctors from wearing their traditional white coats. The uniform was seen as ‘an outdated symbol of doctors’ power’, and some gobbledegook reasons were also given about how the coats were spreading hospital-acquired infections.
Nonsense, of course – infections are acquired in hospitals because the wards are ‘chaotic, squalid and understaffed’, as Seamus O’Mahony, who has worked for the NHS and is now a consultant in Ireland, hardly needs to tell us. There is a shortage of single rooms and isolation facilities. Cleaning, at one time overseen by a ward sister, has been ‘outsourced’ to the corner-cutting private sector.
The medical profession is no longer run and organised by doctors, surgeons and ward sisters – it is instead paralysed by highly paid management consultants and commercial lawyers, who have imposed protocols and audits. Today, ‘sick people are a quantifiable input that must be processed into an output’. Operations are cancelled and people left to die in corridors rather than imperil the quotas and salary bonuses.
Doctors and nurses are now browbeaten cogs in a vast, institutionalised and bureaucratic machine. Doctors are further put under pressure by the pharmaceutical industry, which funds research into new drugs and pays for conferences and specialised journals; scientific publishing, churning out more than 420,000 papers a year, is worth an astonishing €21 billion. Yet what the pill-producers really want is not universal good health, but simply a chance to ‘promote their wares’. Clinical trials, for example, are ‘deliberately designed to maximise the commercial possibilities of a drug’.
But the biggest scandal – leading to a huge waste of money and resources – is the attitude towards old age. ‘Most of the diseases that kill us now are caused by, and associated with, ageing,’ says O’Mahony. Pumped full of antibiotics, we are condemned, unless assisted dying can come in, to spend our eighties and nineties in a ‘care home’ enduring dementia and incontinence.
Can medicine be cured, the author of this deeply fascinating and rousing book asks. I think so, though what health services need is not more money, which they will squander, but a radical change of philosophy and attitude, starting with doctors being put back in white coats and the immediate expulsion of management consultants.