Once again Iona Heath gets it right. In last week’s BMJ she wrote about the clash between organisational models and clinical models of health care. In short, she was pointing out that the moral imperative of a doctor was to provide the best care for the individual patient, and that the political perspective was focused at a population level.
I thought this paragraph was particularly pertinent.
Politicians tend to emphasise the uniformity of people. Despite the contemporary emphasis on choice, they cling to a normative view of patient aspiration, which is then reflected in the increasingly rigid guidelines that dictate clinical care. Clinicians, on the other hand, emphasise the diversity of patients and the challenge that this represents in providing the space needed to allow each individual patient to retain his or her moral stature—an aspiration that goes way beyond the meagre rhetoric of choice.
Heroes Not Zombies 
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