I first read about Mr. John Petri, an orthopaedic surgeon, in last week's prints but today the Daily Mail provided him with a page in which to tell his own story. He is Italian by birth but liked this country so much he took British nationality whilst working for the NHS for some 20-years. Today, depressed and dissatisfied, he is leaving to work in Switzerland.
His story is simple and telling: "In one year I brought my waiting list in the orthopaedic department down from one year to zero. You should have seen the look on patients' faces when I told them there was no wait for hip and knee operations." He had quickly realised that consultant surgeons in this country do one operation at a time in conjunction with one anaesthetist but on the continent they work with more than one so that as one patient is being prepared, another is being operated on. Such a teamwork approach has startling results. "In one French hospital there were four surgeons and twelve anaesthetists and each surgeon did 745 operations a year. At the James Paget Hospital [Great Yarmouth] there were eight surgeons and 23 anaesthetists and 322 operations."
Well, no surprise there, I think we all suspect that the conspiracy of the consultants is mafia-like in its power and corruption, but what is truly awful about this story is the part played by our prime minister and his underlings. In 2006 Mr. Petri was invited to a half hour meeting with Mr. Blair who was enthusiastic and promised to send some heavy-weight people down from Whitehall. Six months later a team duly appeared, looked around, and then disappeared, never to be heard of again. To be fair to Mrs. Hewitt, not something that is high on my list of priorities, she did attempt to cajole consultant surgeons into trying Mr. Petri's methods but they demurred.
Please read the article for yourselves and weep! Mr. Blair's failure to face up to the consultants and force them to adopt this commonsense practice, speaks volumes for either his political cowardice, or his gross ineptitude.
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