Chris Whitty

And I think from both perspectives, I think there'll be people who think that it is too cautious and people who think that it isn't cautious enough.

Last week, Chris Whitty, the England CMO, gave the inaugural BMJ lecture that we partnered with the Academy of Medical Sciences on risk holding.

And what he talked about was the issue of risk.

If we go back to the 70s, 80s, 90s, often junior staff, a resident doctor or a junior doctor would hold a lot of the risk, would see the patients, make the decisions.

Well, what's in scope, though, however, is the supervision of PAs.

And one of the themes here is you talked about multidisciplinary teams or the support that people have.

If I hark back to Chris Whitty's lecture last week, and obviously we hear this a lot anecdotally from resident doctors, is that one of the challenges people face now is that we don't have those support structures in place.

So if the risk has gone right up here, to move the risk back down, to even that out, to smooth that out, so there's more risk carried at lower levels, the earlier stages in your career, and then there's a smoother transition.

I think what we're not, um, what we're not recognizing is, is how do you, you know, enable people to have a meaningful, uh, valuable, independent life, and what are the factors that each and every person needs to do that, not just those who can afford it or those who are in, um, parts of the country that are more wealthy than others.

Um, and you know all the, all the research by, uh, Chris Whitty and, um, Michael Marmot's work, you know, which shows that sometimes it's a really bad place to grow old, the UK.

I think Michael Marmot really was really clear about just, uh, how difficult it is to grow old in a, in a well, in a well way, um, within the UK.

And I think social care absolutely can have a, a role in supporting that.

You know, it's about on average 30 attempts before you'll manage to quit for good.

I mean, there's a lovely quote, you know, you've quoted David Lynch and I'm just quoting Professor Chris Whitty here.

You know, as a doctor, I've seen many people in hospital desperate to stop smoking because it's killing them and yet they cannot quit.

Their choice has been removed.

Cancers that present at a very advanced stage and basically metastasize and result in loss of life very quickly.

Professor Dalgleish also questions the intellectual capacities of the chief medical officer in his own turn of phrase.

Watch that.

You won't fail to be.

Yeah, watch it.

Now, he says that he points out the chief medical officer, Chris Whitton, in my country, said we need to vaccinate kids to protect grandparents.

But grandparents had already been vaccinated.

So why weren't they protected? So we were according to according to the chief medical officer.

In fact, they were going down.

Uh, the chief physician, that's the chief medical officer of Denmark, um, basically that's our Anthony Fauci or Chris Whitty, the, the, the sort of boss doctor.

We plan to reopen the vaccination program in the autumn.

Fair enough.

Uh, Dr Liang Wenning, uh, head of expert panel.

So thi- this is the c- this is kind of the Anthony Fauci of, uh, of China, head of the expert panel.

Um, but of course, um, just as the same way as our chief medical officers, whether it's Anthony Fauci or Chris Whitty or Patrick Vallance, um, are, um, uh, have to take note of political reality.

Uh, the same is this true in China or even perhaps more so.

some level throughout the whole of my career actually since I started working on clinical skills when I was a registrar and it just baffled me why people weren't trained to do the things they needed to do as doctors and I thought we've got to sort this out and I've actually spent most of my career either in undergraduate or postgraduate medicine doing that alongside my day job as a physician and rheumatologist and I actually had just had become emeritus, retired from UCL, was picking up a portfolio of things to do to keep me from getting bored and senile.

And and I was sort of tapped up by Chris Whitty, who said, if this happened, this was when phase one of the medical education and training was going on.

If we needed someone to lead the implementation, would I be prepared to be put forward as part of a group? And actually, I didn't hesitate.

And the reason is, for goodness sake, it needs fixing.

And so there's a question about what is, first of all, what is a doctor? Well, it's a bit like what is a dog or a cat? We know one when we see one.

And people keep trying to redefine it.

And actually, I was talking to Chris Whitty about it, and he said, well, people have been redefining what a doctor is for about 700 years.

Yeah.