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  • What Is a Doctor?

  • A GP's Prescription for the Future
  • By: Dr Phil Whitaker
  • Narrated by: John Sackville
  • Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)

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What Is a Doctor? cover art

What Is a Doctor?

By: Dr Phil Whitaker
Narrated by: John Sackville
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Summary

What Is a Doctor? is a vital contribution to the ongoing debate about how we maintain an NHS that is both fit for purpose and free. Using stories and case studies from across his thirty-year career as a GP, Dr Phil Whitaker offers insight into the medical movements, political interference and societal changes that have transformed the role of doctor over the past three decades.

Much has altered for the better but, even when based on good intentions, an equal or greater amount has been damaging and threatens the sustainability of the NHS. In examining what it means to be a doctor today, this book also answers an accompanying question ‘what is a patient?’ – and how we can all take a more active role in our healthcare. And, looking forward, Dr Whitaker describes what might yet be done to restore the NHS and its capacity for properly patient-centred care.
©2023 Phil Whitaker (P)2023 Canongate Books
Medical Policy & Administration Medicine & Health Care Industry
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Critic reviews

'If the NHS is to survive as a model of health-care for another 75 years, it needs thinkers and champions like Dr Whitaker to challenge policy and to ask how the system can reinvent itself. What is a Doctor? is a call to review, renew and revitalise the way we provide medicine, and to ensure that individualised care remains at the heart of the NHS.' (KATHRYN MANNIX, author of WITH THE END IN MIND)

'With meticulous analysis, deep vocational understanding and a palpable compassion for the human stories at the heart of all this, What Is a Doctor? is an essential intervention in the urgent conversation about the future of healthcare in this country.' (POLLY MORLAND)

'This remarkable book shares profound insights into many of the problems facing modern medicine and offers a hopeful way forward - resuscitating the humanity that healthcare desperately needs. Simply brilliant.' (SIR DAVID HASLAM, past chair of NICE and author of SIDE EFFECTS)

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essential reading

*Essential reading for anyone remotely interested in policy or healthcare economics*

Well voiced audio version

Phil. Whitaker wields both the pen and his practice with a rare combination of pragmatism and heart. His ability to narrativise and personify his patient experiences, the changing nature of healthcare and the changes made by successive governments is the perfect antidote to understanding healthcare policy in a fleshed out manner. An antidote to the screeching whirlpool of twitter where a daily deluge of soundbites around the NHS lose the thread of what a healthcare system should achieve.
If you are an economist do not be dissuaded, this is not a fluffy book of human stories cobbled together with idealism. Dr Whitaker manages to sew together human stories with government changes of the healthcare system, how we got here, what should be preserved, promoted and what the practice of doctoring should look like moving forward.
I look forward to hearing more of his ideas in the future.

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Great Book !

Excellent book,very well describe the problems of today's health care in many countries across the World. Great guide for the new health care system. Must read for anybody who wants to live longer and healthier life.

Sebastian

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