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Rachel Rutter near her practice in Stroud. ‘For a long time now, we have in essence been firefighting the daily triage list.’ Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Observer This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape. A New Statesman Book of the Year 2022
A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland, Richard Baker - Waterstones A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland, Richard Baker - Waterstones
This focus on the whole person, while valuable in all medical disciplines, is bread-and-butter work for GPs. Their role as the keeper of patients’ stories is what most of them love about their job, or what they used to. Because the world has turned, and with it the dynamics of primary care. Few of us attending the doctors’ surgery these days expect to see the same GP twice. We don’t know our doctors like we used to, and they don’t know us, a situation only compounded by Covid and the default to remote consultation. Shared stories have, in many cases, given way to medical transactions. As patient numbers have risen, speed of access to a doctor – any doctor – has become the overriding priorityDo away with the local doctor, her bike and wellies, her familiar car, her listening ear, her “accumulated knowledge” of yourself, your family and circumstances, a doctor you say hello to on the street, who recognises you “as a person, rather than a pathology” – remove her, and our whole heath system collapses too. The descriptions of both the people and the place are a delight, beautifully illustrated by Richard Baker’s photographs. Although there is loss and grief in this book, it is also a celebration of what general practice can be at its best. Recommended reading for all aspiring doctors, and especially for those working in health policy, so they may understand and preserve the crown jewels of the NHS. Dr Helen Salisbury, Nuffield Department of Primary Care, University of Oxford
A Fortunate Woman | NB Medical A Fortunate Woman | NB Medical
I laughed out loud at several scenes, and wiped away tears at others; this evoked human drama and life’s ebbs and flow in all its complexity, bound up by a love for the wild surroundings of the valley practice, haunted and inspired by the original book (and GP) on which this is based: “A Fortunate Man.”
The doctor’s compassion and hard work is a constant reminder of her and her family’s dedication to her vocation.
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