Medicine to serve an ageing society

doi:10.1136/bmj.320.7232.447/a

BMJ 2000;320:447 ( 12 February )

Letters

Medicine to serve an ageing society

Retired doctors could have a role

Profile of elderly people in society needs to be raised

Retired doctors could have a role

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ With reference to Tonks's editorial about medicine in an ageing society,¹ it is surprising that there was no discussionof the possibility of recruiting retired doctors to provide directadvice and supervision to sick elderlypeople.

They will have had wide experience and so provide the "generalist" element required. They will have lived through the sameevents as their patients and been moulded by them enabling thegenuine empathy of a cohort comradeship. They will be experiencingthe progressive changes in outlook and capacity conferred or imposedby advancing years. They will eschew mindless and unrewardingover investigation for investigation's sake. They will also havebeen subjected to the automatic ageism of compulsory retirement,and the automatic condemnation of being out of date and "pastit." If the NHS employers had any sense and were prepared to jettisontheir bias, they might just be able to persuade some . . . [Full text of this article]