‘Richard, have you got a minute?’
Richard paused, frowning as he glanced at his watch.
‘Barely,’ he told the hospital’s chief executive. ‘My clinic starts in half an hour and I’ve got a couple of phone calls I need to make first.’
‘I really do need to talk to you, Richard,’ the other man insisted. ‘We’ve got a committee meeting coming up soon and we still have to go through your budgets.’
Richard grimaced, suppressing his instinctive response, which was to say that he was a surgeon, not an accountant. It was pointless losing his temper with Brian; he was just as much a victim of the financial cuts being imposed on them as he himself was.
‘Look, let’s go into my office,’ Brian suggested, taking advantage of his silence.
Irritably Richard followed him, shaking his head when Brian offered him coffee. ‘No, I forgot for a moment—you’re a tea man, aren’t you?’
‘I drank too much coffee when I was a student and a young intern,’ Richard told him. ‘They talk about working long hours now, but when I first qualified… Still, we didn’t have the same pressures on us then that they do now, nor the huge diversity of skills and facts to learn. These days there seems to be a new drug on the market every day and a new set of complications to go with it, never mind all the new operating techniques, and then of course there’s the paperwork…’
Brian Simmonds watched him sympathetically. He had remarked at last month’s meeting to the new area health chief administrator that it was perhaps unfair to expect some of their senior and older medical staff to be able to absorb the intricacies of the new technology and the tighter control of finances as speedily as the younger ones.
‘If that’s the case, then perhaps you ought to be thinking about pensioning a few of them off,’ had been David Howarth’s cold response. ‘It appals me to see how much money we’re wasting paying top salaries to people who could quite easily be replaced by someone younger—and cheaper.
‘The whole area health system needs reorganising and rationalising. We’ve got far too many small specialist units competing with one another. It would make much more sense to nominate specific hospitals to deal with specific areas of expertise. Out of the eighteen hospitals in this area, a good number of them have specialist heart units, and both your hospital and the Northern have specialised microsurgery units. Older surgeons like Richard Humphries…’
‘Richard Humphries was the first local surgeon to specialise in his field,’ Brian had protested defensively. ‘He really pioneered the treatment in his area…’
‘But Richard Humphries is a man not far off sixty who, no matter how excellent a surgeon he might be, has made it plain that he just isn’t equipped to deal with the financial implications of working in an independent hospital. Christopher Jeffries at the Northern, in contrast, has already shown that he has an excellent grasp of the way we’re going to need to operate in future to make sure we’re financially viable, and he’s twenty years younger than Richard.’
Brian hadn’t repeated their conversation to Richard. Richard and David had taken a dislike to one another virtually at first sight, and Brian already knew from past experience that Richard was simply not a man to compromise on what he believed were the best interests of his patients for any mere financial reasons.
Richard epitomised all that was best in the Health Service, its principles and its goals, while David on the other hand represented the new financial cutting edge that was being imposed on it to try to counteract the burden of a growing population and the rapid advances made in medical technology.
He sighed to himself, knowing that the problem was one thing, but finding the answers to it was something else again, and while David and his like believed that the answer was a far more hard-nosed response to the provision of health services, and while publicly Brian might feel it was politic to agree with him, privately he couldn’t help but sympathise with Richard’s totally opposite point of view.
Sympathising with him was one thing, failing to get across to him the message that if financial restraints were not self imposed then they would be imposed from outside was another matter, and one that could potentially prejudice the whole hospital’s future.
‘Our accountant was on the phone yesterday,’ he told Richard now. ‘It seems that she still hasn’t received your budget forecasts for the next quarter…’
‘What exactly is the hospital paying me for?’ Richard countered irritably. ‘Filling
in forms or operating on patients?’
Brian sighed again. ‘Richard, I know how you feel, but try not to make too much of an enemy of people like David.’ He moved uncomfortably in his seat. ‘There are areas where savings can be made. The Northern——’
‘The Northern has a far lower post-operation recovery-rate than we do here,’ Richard interrupted, and added bluntly, ‘And you already know my opinion on the reasons for that…’
‘You’re getting too old and too idealistic, Richard,’ his GP son-in-law had told him drily the last time they had met. ‘And if you think you’ve got problems you should sit at my desk for a couple of days.’ Too idealistic he might be, but too old… Richard frowned, wondering why the thought should make him feel so edgy and defensive. He wasn’t even sixty yet. No age for a surgeon. Heavens, he could remember when he’d got his first internship: the senior surgeon had been close to seventy and everyone apart from the matron had gone in awe of him. It hadn’t mattered that you had to shout to make yourself heard because he was going deaf; watching him operate had been a privilege. In those days age and experience had been things to honour and respect—not like today, when the moment you got past forty-five you were considered to be past your best.
Back in his office, he found that his secretary, Kelly, had already sorted his mail into urgent and non-urgent piles. On the top of the urgent pile was a GP’s report on one of her female patients. As he studied it he pushed aside his conversation with Brian, frowning as he read the doctor’s findings.
A lump had been detected in the patient’s breast and an immediate operation would be necessary to perform a biopsy and removal if the lump was found to be malignant. She was a relatively young woman, only in her mid-thirties, and he knew from experience the trauma she would experience over the potential loss of a breast, but given the choice between that and losing her life…
His frown deepened as he reached into his jacket pocket for his diary, flicking it open until he found what he was looking for.
‘Kelly, how much emergency space have I got left on Thursday?’ he asked his secretary.
‘Thursday,’ she repeated, studying his lists. ‘None…’
‘Well, then, we’ll have to make some; Mrs Jacobs needs surgical attention straight away.’
‘But Thursday’s just two days away; you could afford to hold on until early next week.’