One the many advantages of being a freelance GP is having more time for conversations. At the time I resigned from my partnership, I’d been watching Breaking Bad and the value of our NHS hit me again. If Walter White hadn’t been cooking meth, he would have had to face the prospect of not being able to pay for treatment for his lung cancer. Without the NHS, stark life and death choices will have to be made.
Could I do even something small to help save my bit of the NHS? One of my plans was the pretty nebulous idea of ‘making a difference’, perhaps by helping practices who were struggling by suggesting some different ways of doing things. A pie in the sky idea, of course, but I was by necessity asking myself, ‘What else can a GP do except be a GP?’
I stumbled upon the massive, far-reaching and fascinating area of Improvement Science. Yeah, yeah, I know all that stuff: flip charts and Powerpoint presentations and Blue Sky Thinking business jargon?