View from the Chief Medical Officer Directorate: what lies ahead?
View from the Chief Medical Officer Directorate: what lies ahead?
What should we be concerned about as doctors? We are and should of course be concerned about caring for patients and improving people’s health. But what about how we impact on and influence the bigger challenges around the delivery of care, and what about the ways that we all personally work each day within our jobs?
That is something that we have been thinking a lot about in the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and Deputy Chief Medical Officer (DCMO) team in Scottish Government, and it has been the focus of CMO’s Annual Report this year Realistic Medicine – Doing the Right Thing, which was launched in June.
In the report CMO identifies four significant current and future challenges.
Firstly we have ongoing threats from infectious diseases. Those continue – with some familiar such as COVID-19 and influenza, and some still undoubtably to emerge.
Second, there is the challenge of improving Scotland’s health and tackling health inequalities. Improvements in our health status as a nation were already slowing before the pandemic but the effects of COVID-19 have exacerbated that as well as further increasing existing health inequalities.
Third, our health and social care system is under huge pressure due to the impact of COVID-19, with both a backlog of care to recover, and the physical and emotional toll on our workforce. While this in itself is highly challenging, along with that we have additional very significant projected impacts of demographic change on the need for care.
Lastly we have the climate emergency, and the increasing urgency to act to address this, with the NHS having a crucial role.
There is no doubt that these are huge challenges. The question for us as doctors is what can we do both within and about these challenges. In his report CMO highlights that we must focus on ‘doing the right thing’, for our patients, our colleagues and our planet, and in particular that the time has come for an era in medicine of careful and kind care.
As CMO says in his report:
"Doing the right thing weds scientific understanding and progress with the artistry of human understanding and relationships. It is a value based approach to health and care, allowing all these elements to blend so that meaningful care, that's more likely to provide personal and technical value, and less likely to lead to futility or regret, is realised. This approach in turn, leads to better use of resource and greater societal value."
So how to ‘do the right thing’? That is a question not just for the CMO and the DCMOs, it is a question for us all.
Over the next few newsletters each of the DCMOs look forward to sharing some more of our individual thoughts on this and what it means to us, as doctors and as leaders.
Professor Marion Bain, Professor Nicola Steedman, Professor Graham Ellis
Deputy Chief Medical Officers for Scotland
View from the Chief Medical Officer Directorate: what lies ahead?