What's in a name?

Citation

Lucas, J. (2006), "What's in a name?", Clinical Governance: An International Journal, Vol. 11 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/cgij.2006.24811caa.001

What's in a name?

I’ve always admired enterprise, it seems to be a virtue that captures the skill of adaption and being able to respond to tomorrow’s challenges. I recall a contestant on “Blind Date” describing himself as a Consultant Vision Technician. He was smart, confident and articulate. Consultant is a word the medical profession invented, it conjures up an image of wisdom, respect and seniority, but in this case the candidate was a young window cleaner demonstrating enterprise.

Perhaps we need a bit more enterprise in the NHS; who would have believed that this year 30 percent of qualifying physiotherapists, 20 percent of new nurses and 10 percent of our junior doctors, can’t find work in the NHS. Much of this is due to the fact that the new Health White Paper, our health, our care, our say: a new direction for community services, is signalling that tomorrow’s workforce will be helping us to “stay well”, rather than “making better” and the skills and titles of tomorrow’s health and social care workforce may need to change. In Clinical Governance terms we need to get this right because two of the points of the compass to good governance are about training, regulating and professionally developing staff. With vascular surgeons costing 1 million pounds to train, now searching the “situations vacant” lists the price of getting this wrong is enormous and contributory to an NHS whose staff costs are now seriously disproportionate to what the public purse can afford. The White Paper says we need Health Trainers, Public Health Practitioners and Physician Assistants working in the community. Surely we could turn Physiotherapists into Health Trainers, Nurses into Public Health Practitioners and Junior Doctors into Community based Physician Assistants, after all, what’s in a name; but a dash of enterprise wouldn’t go amiss.

Jeff Lucas