Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The BMA is right to point out that the widespread practice, driven by necessity, of GPs expecting to treat patients in a ten minute consultation is wrong by every measure. Ten minutes is not enough to deal with any but the most trivial of conditions or mundane of routines. These should anyway be carried out by pharmacists or nurses, who incidentally are collectively a lot less well used in this regard than in some European healthcare systems.

If a patient is ill enough to see a doctor, that patient is too ill to be fixed in ten minutes.

The deal between the Colombian government and the Farc rebels, brokered by Cuba assisted by Norway in four years of talks, proves that even after fifty plus years of fighting wars can be brought to an end. And not by violence, but by talking. Talking between enemies, no matter how bitter and guilty of what atrocities. That is how Great Britain ended the insurgencies which developed as its empire unwound, and as it finally brought peace to Northern Ireland. In the end there are no red lines; only the need to find common purpose.

There are now wars or insurgencies in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq and and Afghanistan. There are many threads to each of them and the violence varies in intensity from place to place and from and time to time, but it never goes away. The humanitarian disasters incorporated as part of daily life in these stricken areas are known and lamented but defy long term solution until the fighting stops. And stop it must. All the rival coalitions engaged in an extraordinary tangle of international breakdown must sooner or later see that there is no other way forward. If there were a military solution available it would have happened years ago.