Your BMA: new beginnings

This is the final issue of The Doctor magazine in its current format. Having first landed on doorsteps in September, 2018, the team has been proud to investigate the issues which matter most to our profession in great detail, placing doctors at the heart of that storytelling and the debate, for 74 editions now.

As I said in last month’s column, we’ll now be moving to our new online home at thedoctor.bma.org.uk. While it will be sad to see the print edition of the magazine cease, I am tremendously proud of everything the team has achieved in that medium and I know they will go on telling the stories of our members and our profession – and investigating the issues which affect our lives – with the same commitment and dedication. 

In last month’s column I wrote about how I have often been most proud of the magazine for offering an outlet where doctors can speak about the most difficult of issues – often these are things we find it incredibly hard to talk about across society or where it doesn’t always feel there is another safe space, and this magazine has been that place.

These features included the story of a GP’s dogged attempt to find answers over the death of her consultant husband, the colleagues of a GP speaking about her suicide, sexism in surgery and a litany of pieces lobbying for better support for doctors under NHS and GMC investigation, among others.

In this month’s final column I would like to reflect on some of the magazine’s most impressive investigations and campaigns to date. 

When the pay restoration campaign first kicked off in late 2022, the team set about telling the human stories of the junior (now resident) doctors at the heart of the campaign. These in-depth interviews gave the doctors in question the space and time to share their experiences of how poor pay and conditions had affected their lives and their own health. 

The Doctor magazine covered doctors with different stories, from being forced to sit on bins when working and financial worries owing to taking on insurmountable levels of debt, to how international medical graduates have been exploited over pay and conditions and what it feels like through the eyes of a more senior doctor who has seen the erosion first hand throughout their career. 

At the very beginning of the magazine’s existence the team campaigned to tell the positive stories of overseas doctors coming to this country – and the massive benefit immigration brings to the NHS. The series, called, They Come Here told some incredibly powerful stories over the course of many months. 

Over recent years we have regularly shone a spotlight on the parlous state of mental health services – culminating in our recent, ongoing, campaign called Paucity of Esteem for which our writers Ben Ireland and Peter Blackburn won a British Journalism Award last year. In that campaign they uncovered the state of mental health services, the scandal of patients being sent further than ever to out-of-area placements and a rapid rise in detentions under the Mental Health Act – highlighting a system so broken it simply ‘stores’ people up until they are in absolute crisis. 

For another piece in the series Ben Ireland spent a week in Bristol covering the inquest into the death of young artist Evie Wilson, whose GP father and mother, who has worked in healthcare roles, spoke poignantly about how she was passed from pillar to post in a mental health system which was not listening to her concerns.

Evie’s experiences came across in her own artwork, through which she explained how she was told she was ‘too sick’ for some services yet ‘not sick enough’ for others, treatment which only added to her feelings of being left behind and ‘othered’. The evidence heard in the inquest pointed to some of the findings of a BMA report which concluded the mental healthcare system in England is ‘broken’ and ‘dysfunctional’.

The magazine has also been recognised by national awards schemes for investigative pieces looking at poverty and health, homelessness, and, recently, an in-depth exposé of failings at the mental health trust which treated Nottingham attacks perpetrator Valdo Calocane.  

These are just a few examples from an enormous catalogue of campaigning and investigative journalism which has sought to place doctors at its very heart. I am beyond proud of the work the team is doing and delighted the BMA will continue to invest in this high-quality journalism.  

I would like to extend my thanks, on behalf of the association and our members, to Neil Hallows – who has been a peerless editor of this magazine from its inception – and the rest of the team for their brilliant, tireless, work. 

I look forward to the many more stories the team will bring to our membership in their new home online. Please do make those few clicks and join us online. The success of The Doctor magazine has always been its dialogue with our members, its readers – you.

As ever, I am always happy to hear from you and any questions you might have. To get in touch please write to me at RBChair@bma.org.uk or @DrLatifaPatel

Dr Latifa Patel is chair of the BMA representative body