In healthcare we have two masters in our work, like it or not. The first is the patient. They should be the ultimate master - the one for which we design and do everything, the one for which we are to serve as part of our work. That is of course why we signed up to do this in the first place and that’s certainly why we said we did.
The difficulty with this arrangement in the modern world is that the second master is the bank manager (or equivalent)
In my own circumstances the only money our practice gets is from paying patients.
It is hard enough though to balance these two masters in any reasonable way without the developing culture of ‘Esther Ransom’s’ battering us anytime that an issue occurs with a patient or a problem exists. This is the culture of the patient as a customer.
It is not possible for patients to be both customers and patients and they must choose the situation that they would like and as a society we must reinforce this. The corporates in dentistry have decided to adopt the 'patient as a customer' model. This is extremely convenient for corporations, it allows them the opportunity to bypass many of the rules and regulations or at the very least hand the responsibility of those onto the individual dentists while absolving themselves from any responsibility for providing quality or empathy.
For the rest of us this is not possible, for the rest of us we must balance the two masters between the concept of the customer. The problem with this model is that we are then wide open to criticism from both angles, that of a professional who is regulated by a professional body and also as a provider of a service from consumers and their organisations. For us it is the chance to be punished twice over in an unfair spiral of regulation and complaints. The problems go way beyond dentists and dentistry and will never be solved in this sphere alone. The problems are that of political intervention, the will of politicians as to how they would like society to evolve. Encouraging more and more consumerism to generate more and more tax revenue to generate a society which fuels an economy which seems to be the most important thing for politicians to do these days.
What is very interesting though is how politicians and their families like to be treated when their health is at risk and the type of people they turn to for attention. It will not be long before the majority of politicians would not entertain the possibility of being treated within an NHS environment for anything but the most severe of health care conditions and that will complete the circle - where society has destroyed that which it once held as one of its dearest assets.
This will ultimately eat itself but the least we can have the pleasure of knowing that we called it.
Blog Post Number - 1308
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