I started writing my blog this week because my beloved wanted to catch up with the footie…… I’m not averse to sport, but 22 men on a field chasing a ball, what is that all about?!

So with nothing on the TV I thought I’d give you my thoughts on a couple of television programmes currently airing featuring GPs.  The first is The Real Peak Practice – a totally excellent fly on the wall documentary following a female Senior Partner of a small two-handed surgery in the Peak District.  The episode I watched followed the GP as she cared for, amongst others, a gentleman suffering with a life-limiting illness and his struggle to communicate as the disease took hold.  The doctor treated this gentleman with all the care and compassion she could. We watched as he deteriorated from communicating with slurred but recognisable speech, to using a computer to talk for him, to moving his eyes left and right to indicate yes or no, to his ultimate and expected passing, but one that happened as he wanted – at home, with his family at his bedside.

When patients enter the terminal phase of any illness, I would hope that they would all get treated with the highest respect for their wishes – and this, dear reader is a very current question: Do doctors have the right to help their patients end their lives?   Whatever your views, (and I’m not here to give you mine) we all deserve to end our days with dignity, grace and respect.  This TV programme was an honest depiction of a GP struggling to manage a vast practice area, with a higher than average elderly population, and limited resources (not an unfamiliar story).  It transpired that this GP lost her husband to a brain tumour several years before and I wonder whether this tragic event helps her treat her patients, because she’s been on the other side of bed, as it were.

Let’s flip the coin now to a TV drama series that’s just started – Dr Foster. Where do we stand on allowing a drama to show a GP bribing a patient with drugs because she wants her philandering husband to be followed?!  I KNOW it’s only TV, I KNOW it’s not real – but surely the reason we love TV dramas so much is because we think they portray real life?! This GP, had she been one of mine, would have been dragged from one end of the surgery to another as we discussed the major significant event that is bribery, breach of confidentiality and downright lunacy.  Within the first 15 minutes of the programme beginning, she had committed so many acts against Hippocrates, she would have been burned at the stake!

Now don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean to say I didn’t enjoy the drama – of course I did – and I’ve watched it for a second time as she commits more improbable wrongdoings, but then I want to see the adulterous husband get his comeuppance as she removes his testicles with a blunt spoon – and hopefully, claims the procedure as a Minor Op under enhanced services!

I do recall another series, more like a soap, that my mother watched on day-time TV, and during a week off work when the furthest I went was to the gate at the bottom of the garden, I decided to watch ‘Doctors’. What a pile of utter codswallop! In my years of working with the Quacks, not once have any of them ever had time to sit down together in the middle of the day for lunch – grab half a sandwich on the way out to a visit maybe, or rush a meeting where you’re trying to speak and eat at the same time, – but NEVER EVER sit down as a group of professionals and relax. And I won’t mention the Practice Manager who must have slept her way into the job – she wasn’t even a good receptionist, nevermind Manager!

I wonder if TV producers feel they ought to follow in Jez Hunt’s shoes? Afterall, he never asks GPs what it’s like in the real world, so why should they?!