• general practice

I've been grieving. I've slowly realised that doctors’ sense of vocation in the National Health Service (NHS), perhaps that of other professions too, seems to have become eroded. Having worked for years with a very stable cohort who have been growing old alongside me, I've been working more recently with general practitioners (GPs) who are fresh out of training. The new generation strikes me as harbingers of a culture I don't recognise and am not sure I want to. But it is after all how they are being trained to survive the NHS, and also perhaps to help the NHS to survive.

Apparently I am not alone in detecting a shift – hospital consultant friends, too, confirm my sense that being a competent …