We must break the culture of cover-up which means doctors are reluctant to blow the whistle on colleagues and we must
We must break the culture of cover-up which means doctors are reluctant to blow the whistle on colleagues and we must offer addicted doctors a route back from disaster. It costs around pounds 200,000 of public money to train a junior doctor. Simply naming and shaming doctors with drug or alcohol problems is therefore a very expensive waste of their skills and experience.There are no reliable figures on the extent of alcohol and other drug dependence in the medical profession. A figure of 9,000 (one in 15 doctors) is often quoted and attributed to the BMA. How- ever, this figure is based on the assumption that doctors have roughly the same risk of developing dependence as other adults. The US has an impressive “Impaired Physicians” programme which gives doctors the support and supervision they need to be able to return to practice safely.Doctors in this country need a similar system. The BMA replies to Dr Martin Hatcher’s article about alcohol and drug abuse by doctors
Dr Martin Hatcher’s account of his drug dependence and recovery holds some important lessons.
Once you get doctors into appropriate treatment programmes for alcohol or other addiction, they make good patients and have an excellent chance of recovery. He describes vividly how doctors deny and conceal addiction and how, even when they have been rumbled, they sometimes run rings around those providing support and treatment.
However, he demonstrates that the picture is not universally bleak. Even the “soundings” taken of party opinion before Mr Hague’s election as leader gave the wrong impression of Mr Clarke’s popularity, because they were based on a ring-round of constituency chairmen, the last redoubt of the old guard.
In truth, the modern Tory party is overwhelmingly and fundamentally opposed to the European project. The electoral base of xenophobia, Little Englanderism, is too small to sustain an election-winning coalition. If the only reason to join the modern Tory party is opposition to the single currency, the party has no prospect of recovery. How can a policy of opposition to joining the euro be time-limited by references to the vagaries of the British electoral cycle?Mr Hague hopes the ballot will put the issue to sleep, but Sir Edward’s question exposes why it will fail.
And Sir Edward is right to be scathing about both the speed with which the ballot is being held and the policy itself. A survey of Tory MPs presented at a Political Studies Association conference yesterday revealed that fully two-thirds of them agree with the fundamentalist statement, “Joining the single currency will signal the end of the UK as a sovereign nation”.That is why Mr Hague knows he is quite safe in calling his ballot of party members on the policy of staying out of the single currency for the duration of the next parliament. Because they do not like trade unions and want more free markets? New Labour is there already Because they support the royal family? The same applies. No, the only reason why anyone would want to join William Hague’s Fresh Start is because they do not like the European Union, and above all the single currency Which is, of course, why Sir Ted is in such a bate. Before the election last year, the survival of such pro-European big beasts of the jungle as Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine at the top of the Tory government gave a misleading impression that the Tory party was somehow divided on Europe.