The business of the last two days has been as part of
stakeholder implementation groups trying to influence the
operational framework that will follow on from the mental health
strategy for England. There is a good relationship with the
Department of Health (DH) officials but, at least perhaps from my
slightly ignorant perspective, it’s like constructing a jigsaw
where you don’t know what the final picture’s going to be. And I
have a slight suspicion that the manufacturers of the jigsaw don’t
know
either.
This carried through to a really helpful
meeting on the other major initiatives coming on stream next year;
that of public health and public mental health. I had a very
good meeting with Gregor Henderson, who is working for the DH
on this. Working through our Public Health lead, Professor Kam
Bhui, this is something that as psychiatrists we need to become far
more active in. The College did a great deal of work on this 2-3
years ago. This work is valued, and will continue to be valuable,
in how as psychiatrists we can and must influence local health and
wellbeing boards.
It was a great honour and privilege to be
invited to the Royal College of Physicians Harveian Oration and
Dinner 2011. Held at the RCP building on Tuesday night, this was a
grand occasion full of decorations, medals and good food. But the
real privilege was to listen to the speaker, Dr Iona Heath, a
General Practitioner who has worked in Kentish Town for over 35
years and is now President of the Royal College of General
Practitioners.
Her talk was
‘Divided we fail’. It brought us back to the very roots of why
we practice as doctors. In a masterly and creative way, she spoke
to the challenge of the division between GPs and specialists; she
spoke to the profession; she spoke of the body in terms of science
and poetry, biology and biography; and finally, she spoke to the
key issue of society, and how the biology of biography makes the
structural violence of unjust societies of immediate relevance to
us as doctors. I am very much hoping that I can persuade her to
come to one of our International Congresses as I am sure that, as a
critical friend of psychiatry, she has a constructive critique to
make of us.
Iona concluded: "Medicine will never be a pure
and simple place, but its confident interplay of opposites makes
space for courage, joy, creativity and freedom, and the possibility
of making the world a better place." I think it is by going back to
these first principles, when sat in endless meetings, that
hopefully as psychiatrists we will be able to deliver better
services for our patients.
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