Back in Blighty

Coming Home.

Well, we’ve been home roughly 6 weeks now and I’ve finally got round to righting up the final chapter of our USA adventure.

So our first impressions on returning home?

Britain is beautiful and amazingly green. The green is really striking at first glimpse when you’re flying over. It has a real sense of living history – everywhere from the local village pub, to the Royal wedding at Westminster Abbey. Despite it’s reputation, the food is great. Proper sausages, Roast lamb, Yorkshire puddings and gravy, fish and chips with loads of salt and vinegar, proper bacon (and proper bacon sarnies), chicken tikka masala, and the choice of Thai, Chinese, Indian, Malaysian, French, Moroccan, Lebanese, Italian Cuisines. I haven’t had a single burger since we’ve been back. The beer is lovely and warm. Even the weather was great for the first few weeks – probably the best we’ll have all year though. People are more modest, and definitely more reserved.

It’s also very crowded. There is far too much traffic. There are speed cameras and surveillance cameras everywhere. Parking is an issue almost everywhere. Everything seems smaller – the cars, the parking spaces, the houses, the food portions…

Moving back has not been without its drama – nearly missing our flight back, then arriving without any luggage, and a long frustrating search for a home to rent in our new location in the UK. Then taxing and insuring the car, setting up mobile phones and Internet, etc. Moving home 5 times in 5 years has not done the credit rating much good and it’s a real pain filling in the forms. Maybe our memory is short, but it does seem like the move out to the USA was easier than the move back home. I say home, but it’s really hard to define where home is at the moment. Moving house is supposed to be one of the most stressful life events – after a death in the family, and a divorce. Our 5-year-old boy has lived in 5 homes. Now we are in our new home in the UK for at least 6 months before it’s time to move again. We still haven’t unpacked everything yet. In fact I only unpacked my suitcase 5 days ago. It’s taken a month to find somewhere to live, and we still haven’t been able to get our children into a school. We seem to get past one hurdle then find another hurdle of red tape to get past. To find out that nearly all the schools in our region are full and we have no control over which school they are allocated to is frustrating and thoroughly depressing. Moving home has been harder than I ever thought it would be. With retrospect I think I just didn’t plan the return home as well as the trip out to Michigan.

What about going back to work in the NHS? I have been asked many times which is the better healthcare system. I can’t answer that question, because I genuinely can’t decide. The best I can do is to say that both have their pro’s and con’s.

I knew going back to being a trainee after a year working as an instructor in a supervisory role would be tricky and it has been. I’m currently working in a hospital that I never worked in before so I’m completely knew to them, which means I have to give a short potted Curriculum Vitae about 5 times a day. I also have to be constantly mindful that I am not the boss and someone else is often ultimately taking responsibility for my actions. You would think it would be easier going to a job with less responsibility, but it’s not. I still have that responsibility but I also now have the problem of how much responsibility do I take and how much to pass on to the boss. Those who have been in the same position will probably understand. Nearly everyone I have worked with since returning has been genuinely interested in my USA experience, and I have been very happy talking about it. I’m sure I have bored a few people to death about it by now, but I make no apologies for that.

The NHS itself hasn’t changed that much in a year, despite the doom and gloom in the media. It still provides excellent world-class care to whoever walks through the door, completely free, regardless of your position in society. That is still something to be proud of. After returning from a place like the University of Michigan to an NHS hospital it is easy to find things to criticise. The hospitals look old, tired and dirty. I have seen some shockingly poor maintenance issues. I’ve heard of new wards closed for repair months later because corners were cut and the roofs were not sealed properly. Medical equipment is sometimes unavailable because it has broken, and maintenance contracts have not been maintained. Adult patients are being nursed on wards that were meant for paediatric day surgery because the adult wards are full of medical patients. Bed occupancy is constantly at crisis level. The staff in the NHS are generally frustrated and fed up with these recurring chronic problems, and seem powerless to do anything about them. The managers are caught between trying to manage the hospital and constant pressure from the politicians to do more with less money. The politicians of course are only interested in the statistics that they can sell to the public – waiting list times, MRSA rates, 4 hour target achievements in A&E – the headline grabbers. The funding and investment therefore is possibly disproportionately spent on things that give good headlines.

There are lots of areas of the NHS that have suffered from underinvestment over time, but the thing that stares out at me as a huge difference between the NHS and my experience in the USA is in the use of technology. Patient records consist of piles of paper notes in folders that are often falling apart, and the first hour of my day consists of running around the hospital running from ward to ward trying to find my patients for the day, then trying to find the notes somewhere on the ward, then trying to find the information I need somewhere in the 4 folders of notes. Consequently I’m often not ready to start the lists on time. However, there aren’t enough theatre porters to get the patients to theatre on time so I’m still ready before we have a patient. Lists often start late. It’s also difficult to contact members of the theatre team or be contacted about changes in the list or to relay some vital information about the patient. Even communication between myself and the consultant I’m working with is difficult and often relies on the hope that we’ll both turn up on the same ward at the same time. We don’t carry any bleep or paging system, and mobile phone signals are very variable. Switchboard is still completely unautomated and it can take 10 minutes just for them to pick the phone up. In a specialty and an industry where poor communication has been known for years to be the leading cause of medical errors, it is still remarkably difficult to communicate with your team members unless you are in the same room as them.

These things are not new. They have been the same problems to a greater or lesser extent I have seen in every hospital I have worked at in the UK (8 in total) or been a student at (another 7) over the last 16 years. 16 years ago (1995) was around the time it feels to me like the world we live in started to change in a major way. In 1995 few people had mobiles or e-mail or laptops. Some had desktop computers, but no-one had the internet. There were no smartphones, satnavs, WiFi , Automated phone menus. There was also no such thing as automatic check in, call centres, online banking, e-billing. No touch screens and electronic form filling. No Wifi cafes; No Google; No online data storage. You may think that not all of these changes have been for the better, but it would be hard to imagine a world now without any of these things. As the technology has been invented, companies have invested in them to keep ahead of the game. Those that have not kept up with the game have perished. How many people would open a bank account now that did not offer online or telephone banking, and worked on paper records for your account? How many businesses would not provide any method of mobile communication to it’s employees? In short – the world has changed, we have changed, but the NHS has not. Whilst private companies were investing millions into technology, and the University of Michigan was investing millions in it’s electronic records systems, the NHS received some of its biggest ever increase in budget (during the early years of New Labour from 1997 onwards). Rather than using this money to invest in new technologies that would improve efficiency, productivity and safety, it was spent on meeting the headline grabbing targets. Now the money has dried up the waiting lists are growing again, and the efficiency, productivity and clinical outcomes are lagging behind. The governments response is of course to blame the staff, rather than blame themselves for such short sightedness. To see how important technology is for patient safety at the University of Michigan anesthesiology department you can read this excellent article by the chair of the department Dr Kevin Tremper, who also gave a lecture on the subject at the ASA conference in San Diego.

This link should take you to the publication in April’s Anesthesiology. I highly recommend it, especially if you are an anaesthetist or have an interest in patient safety. In the article, Dr Tremper describes the change in anaesthetic monitoring in relation with changes in the cockpit of aircraft. Both industries with a keen interest in safety. (Picture is from the article published in Anesthesiology)

Of course there are other issues. The geography of the UK has resulted in lots of hospitals offering the same services with a small geographical area. All of these hospitals require a certain minimum number of staff to keep them running. The EWTD (European Working Time Directive) has had a huge effect on working hours and on-call rotas in particular. This has 2 effects. First – it is difficult for smaller hospitals to staff the on-call rotas. Second – it means that the staff do more shift work, and less Monday to Friday 9-5 work. This is bad news if you are in a training post. The current generation of trainee doctors are suffering from less experience and on the job training than previous generations. Despite this though, it is my opinion that training here is very high quality – though it is more spread out than the American training, which is shorter and more intense. After all - my training allowed me to go to the USA, work in a very different health care system, work as an attending, and manage some difficult cases on some complicated patients.

The unions also have a powerful grip over the NHS and in my opinion are responsible for a certain element of resistance to change. Whilst the NHS is kept in such a tight grip of government and union control, and politicians work on 4 year cycles I think it will always suffer from poor long term investment, and it will ultimately fall behind the rest of the world in terms of efficiency and patient safety. I hope this doesn’t happen, because I still believe in the NHS. It is ultimately a more efficient way to deliver healthcare – without the costs involved with insurance and billing. It needs to keep up with the times though. It needs good leadership with an eye on the long term plan, without the inevitable bias and baggage that comes with politics. Otherwise it will be run to failure, then privatization.

In the mean time I’m going to start looking for a consultant post in the NHS, and try to do my bit to use what I have seen and learnt from this experience in my practice here. It has been an amazing experience. One that I am very grateful to have been allowed to do. I can’t recommend a year abroad highly enough, and I can thoroughly recommend a year at the University of Michigan. I hope to return there one day and I look forward to seeing friends and colleagues again. As for my blog, this is Dr Ramoray signing out. Thank you for sharing our journey. I hope you have enjoyed the ramblings, and I hope it has inspired some of you to go and explore, broaden your horizons and see different ways of working and living. If you do please share your experiences!

For the last time,

Take care,

Drake.