F E AT URE P R O F IL E
Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard talks to Adam Campbell about her first 11 months as Chair of the RCGP and what keeps her going
I
T HAS been quite a rollercoaster,” says Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard when I ask her about her 11 months as Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners. The highs, she says, have been “amazing, remarkable, the best job in the world”, but the lows, about 20 per cent of the experience, have been “pretty grim”. “It’s been fascinating how social media has kicked off in certain areas,” she says, by way of explanation.
“Some pressure groups get very personal and nasty.” Does she care to name any? She brushes this off with a hearty laugh. “Let’s not go there!” The aggro is not wholly unexpected, says Stokes-
Lampard – after all, she was RCGP Treasurer between 2012 and 2016 and worked closely with two previous Chairs, Clare Gerada and Maureen Baker – and she understands that most of it is directed at the role rather than at her personally. She clearly likes metaphors and uses a particularly
vertiginous one to make her point: “It’s like I’m constantly walking a tightrope in high heels.”
TAKING THE BATON The pressures facing GPs, says Stokes-Lampard, can be summarised under the heading “workload”. “I think just about everything else falls into workload, because it is going up inexorably. We have an ageing population, they have more chronic long-term conditions and the population is growing as a baseline, whereas the number of GPs is not growing. “More work is being pushed into the community without the resource necessarily following it, which is putting stress and pressure on GPs at a time when we are more regulated than we’ve ever been. We’re having to tick a lot of boxes when what we want to do is deliver person-centred care. The stress is leading to burnout and to people haemorrhaging from the profession.” She credits Clare Gerada for raising the alarm about the coming crisis in general practice long before it was clear to others, and Maureen Baker for launching the RCGP’s Put Patients First: Back General Practice campaign. This led, in England, to the GP Forward View, promising 5,000 more GPs, 5,000 more allied healthcare professionals and £2.4 billion extra per year for NHS general practice by 2021. With the GP Forward View already on the table in
10 / MDDUS INSIGHT / Q4 2017
AN EVENTF
England – and the College looking to secure comparable promises for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – it was clear to Stokes-Lampard that her tenure should not be about starting something new but rather seizing the baton and taking it forward. “I felt this was too important a time to destabilise what the College was doing for the sake of vanity,” she explains. “I genuinely felt that the right thing was to hold to account, not to mess things around and start again. And that seems to be working so far.” Combined with the high-wire media act that comes with the territory – although she admits to quite enjoying “the adrenaline rush of a big media day” – this holding to account makes for a punishing schedule. Some weeks will see her travel from one end of the country to the other and back again. “The good bits, of course, are that I’m meeting GPs all over the place, but it’s physically very demanding.” One regular port in the storm is the day a week she continues to work in the Lichfield practice where she has been a partner since 2002. It’s a job she loves, and working with patients “helps to keep you grounded”, she says. It also means that when it comes to discussing the pressures on GPs
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