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David Oliver: Challenging the victim narrative about NHS doctors

BMJ 2017; 359 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j4304 (Published 17 October 2017) Cite this as: BMJ 2017;359:j4304

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Re: David Oliver: Challenging the victim narrative about NHS doctors

I disagree that there is a particular 'victim narrative' which doctors are buying into. However, it would be misleading to suggest that the NHS, its staff and its patients ie all of us, are not victims of the deliberate and unprecedented actions of government and its commercial partners.

While experience of disempowerment and deprofessionalisation are ubiquitous among us, it is more concerning that doctors (and nurses, etc) are being genuinely traumatised by the effects of being forced to cope in intolerable and unnecessary situations of under-resourcing and understaffing.

Victims have to be neither helpless nor hapless, but they must be heard. We are duty-bound to raise these issues using evidence to speak truth to power - that is the kind of clinical leadership which current and future patients depend on us for.

"Clinical leader" has become a term which describes doctors who are willing to further the aims of NHS England in morphing the NHS into a shrunken 2nd tier service for those who can't afford to pay for more.

The tone of David Oliver's article has worrying undercurrents of Stockholm syndrome. As a clinical leader, Oliver is in a privileged position to call out the political manipulation which underlies the NHS's current predicament - not to reassure us that we've got it good really.

Acknowledgement of the entire NHS's denigration and its real effects on us all is not the same as the 'poor me' narrative suggested by Oliver. Don't mistake protest for pining; our voices matter.

Competing interests: No competing interests

26 October 2017
Nick Mann
GP
London