Realistic medicine saves the planet? Sustainability, environment and health

I am Dr Kate Dawson, one of the GPs at Benbecula Medical Practice in the Outer Hebrides. I have been working here since 1990, with three short breaks to complete some training, and when I had my babies, who are now grown up. We are lucky to live in a beautiful and precious place, which is generally safe and kind. I love gardening, knitting, and observing our wildlife when I am out walking.


Our islands, though, are very vulnerable to change. Global warming is bringing unpredictable weather, and rising sea levels will change our coastlines. It is getting more difficult to recruit staff, and travel links are not as good as they were a few years ago.


In the face of this, I have been considering the sustainability of the healthcare system that I am part of, and how we can make positive changes that will help our patients achieve better health, and at the same time, reducing our impact on resources. I dived in to think about this in more detail in the last year and found more than I thought possible.


What does sustainability and the environment mean in terms of health care? Here are some of the ideas that may affect patients directly. Some items will not surprise you, others might.

  • Patient transport. This includes trying to use active transport such as walking and cycling, using electric bikes and electric cars. This can be hard when distances are long, and our roads are narrow. However, this also includes trying to avoid travel to appointments when a phone call or video link would be as effective.
  • Waste management: Unused medication should be returned to the surgery for safe disposal, so it does not cause environmental contamination. You can also help by only ordering what you need when ordering repeat prescriptions. Empty inhalers and insulin pens should be returned to the surgery. Incinerating empty inhalers causes less damage than the gas in the inhaler being left in the environment.
  • Better prescribing: As an example, inhalers have a particularly detrimental effect on the environment. One MDI inhaler is as damaging as a drive to Inverness, whereas one breath-activated inhaler is equivalent of a drive between Griminish and Balivanich. Unnecessary and ineffective medication is a waste too. Don’t cut down on your inhalers, get advice about managing your asthma more effectively, use your preventer more, and ask to try a switch to breath activated inhalers.
  • Better decisions: Better discussions about treatment and referral help patients and doctors make better decisions. If you are referred for a treatment that you Don’t really want, or which may not benefit you much, then it is far better to discuss this before the travel, prescribing, tests and worry begin. It begins with talking frankly to your GP about the benefits, risks, and alternatives to the proposed treatment, and to ask what would happen if you did not seek treatment. Take someone with you if you need support with these discussions.
  • Good health is more than medication: Our current medical model from the twentieth century has been about patients coming to the doctors, their ailments quickly assessed, and a treatment or procedure prescribed. With authoritarian health care, the patient can become a passive recipient of medical care, and every ailment is met with a treatment or a procedure. There may be another healthier, less wasteful, more sustainable way.

Imagine this; you can improve your appearance, reduce your need for medication, your reliance on health care, improve your energy levels and joy in life, the benefits will last for years, and the cost is minimal. I am really excited with the possibilities. What is the secret? What if everyone could do this, it would reduce reliance on health care resources, and we would live to enjoy health into our retirement. I am talking about improving health by improving fitness.


As an example, the most cost-effective treatments for Chronic Airways Disease (COPD) are physical activity, smoking cessation, and flu immunisation. These three things are associated with better outcomes than any inhaler or medication.


I am using the word ‘fitness’ for a good reason, as it covers lots of concepts. It does not focus specifically on weight, or exercise, or smoking, or alcohol. It just focuses on being healthier. Where should you start? The beginning is to think about what you want to improve, to imagine what your goal is, what is driving you to consider making a change. Give yourself permission to write down or say aloud what you want to change, what could be better. Perhaps you want to be less short of breath, or your knees to hurt less, or to feel less lonely. Your goal will inspire you to keep trying. You could list all the things you might want to change and work out what you need to do for each thing.


Don’t try to change everything all at once. It is better to focus on one easy thing at a time and make it about fitness and fun. This year, for example, I plan to go for a walk at least once a week. If I miss a week, I have given myself permission to try again the next week, and not to give up when I fail. Last year, we started using smaller plates to reduce our portion sizes without cutting out our favourite foods. You Don’t need Lycra, or to run, or to go on an extreme diet, just find one thing that you can do, that you can enjoy, and make that into a habit that you can sustain.


Who are your allies? Have you got a trusted friend to talk to? A professional such as a physiotherapist, counsellor, nurse, or doctor could listen and support you, if you asked for this; the most important thing is to find someone who can listen to you. They may help you work out what you might be able to do next, to identify one thing that you can do easily, and to support you too.
Your one change may bring more benefits than you think. Going for a short walk will improve your fitness, and it will also raise your mood, reduce isolation, and ease joint pain. Meeting up with someone else for an activity such as knitting or singing will improve your mental agility, and will also reduce isolation, low mood, and loneliness.


As you start to improve your health, you may inspire others. We could have a new normal, in which we support each other to take steps to improve our health through simple changes to our lifestyles, reducing our reliance on medication and leading more fulfilling and joyful lives. We can help the environment and the NHS stay sustainable by creating our own better health.


For ideas, why not listen to Michael Mosley’s podcast ‘just one thing’ on BBC sounds.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09by3yy/episodes/downloads

My grandmother; what happens without anticipatory care planning.

My grandmother was called Susannah Margaret Helena Mence Davies (nee Bird). She was very small and very elegant. I can remember her doing magic tricks with her pastel shaded Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes, her long fingernails, her colourful and unique dresses. She was also a fine artist, and an instinctive garden designer.

When I was a medical student, she developed one of those mysterious auto-immune diseases that could only be treated with high doses of steroids, and she started to shrink and shuffle.

When I was a junior doctor, she died, and it was terrible. I was a first year SHO, and while I knew the theory of what happened with a perforated bowel, the reality was and still is difficult to accept. She had started to bleed, with abdominal pain, at a social event, and kept a stiff upper lip then and for a few days afterwards, until she collapsed. This was back in the days when omeprazole was a new, specialist drug.

I got a phone call from my mother to explain what had happened, and heard that she had a perforated ulcer that had been three days in the making. I knew how frail she was, and I blurted out that she was likely to die. Although that was a shocking, unfiltered, response, it was in retrospect quite helpful. It allowed my mother and my aunt prepare themselves for what came next.

I drove down from Liverpool to Oxford, to see her. She was pitiful. She was conscious, she was in pain, she was in ITU in one of those gowns that falls open at the back, in a large area where many patients were being cared for, very little privacy. She told me that she wanted to die, that her body had had enough.

I spoke to her consultant, and asked them why? Why was she on renal-dose dopamine? Why was she in ITU? I was too green to take them to task, but I think the team had been wanting to tell me a hopeful tale of ‘everything being done’ when I knew and she knew she just wanted to go, that her illness was probably unsurvivable.

The next day, my aunt intervened, and she was moved to a wee side ward, and my grandfather and my aunt sat with her until she died, with a massive haematemesis.

Wind on all these decades later, and this experience informs me. I know how hard it is, as a relative, to ask the difficult questions of the medical team, how hard it is to say words that are culturally not that acceptable. Are you letting them die, or giving them the grace to go when it is their time. Time has passed; terms like ‘ceiling of care’ ‘ACP’ ‘treatment escalation plan’ were not around.

I’m sure if we’d talked about this seriously as a family, we would have been ready for the difficult conversations, we could have been ready to talk to the consultants, we could have been prepared for the end. Would we have admitted her to hospital? Possibly, but she would never have been in ITU, in pain, indignity and fear. The wait of three days was telling; was she putting off seeking help because she didn’t want to be saved? How frightening not to trust the health professionals to heed your wishes, so that you stay at home in pain, trying to conceal the beginnings of your end.

This still happens, and I want it to stop.

We should be having conversations in our families. We shouldn’t force our relatives to second-guess our wishes, when the stakes are high. We should have a plan, some realistic principles to guide us through the difficult last days. We should not be trying to resist the inevitable, raising unrealistic hopes for what might happen.

This also goes hand in hand with sorting out Power of Attorney, designating someone you trust to speak and intercede on your behalf when you are unable to do so. Don’t forget to tell them your wishes while you are still able. Look after your future self while you are still able.

For examples of anticipatory and advance care planning, here are some links:

When I Am In Doubt

By Dr Chris Nickson

When I am in doubt I talk to surgeons.
I know that they will know what to do.
They seem so sure.

Once I talked to a surgeon.
He said that when he is in doubt
He talks to priests.
Priests will know what to do.
Priests seem so sure.

Once I talked to a priest.
He said that when he is in doubt
He talks to God.
God will know what to do.
God seems so sure.

Once I talked to God.
He said that when he is in doubt
He thinks of me.
He says I will know what to do.
I seem so sure.

Discussing life goals

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l6018 (Published 13 November 2019)

I’m writing to highlight another article in the BMJ written by a patient about goal setting. The article is very simple, about a patient raising the issue of taking up running in an asthma review. It is also very deep, and considers the difficulty of breaking into the nurse’s routine review to raise the issue.

The Quality and Outcomes Framework included many items on a checklist to cover in an asthma review, and even though we are post-QOF in Scotland, we are still using our QOF template.

Some of the suggestions for patient participation made by the article are already in use. For example our asthma nurse makes good use of the self-assessment tools on the Asthma UK website.

I think that the real challenge to our practice is to encourage patients to set their own agenda before their appointment, and to make that appointment a space where the patient’s goals are at the forefront. I plan to take the article in to our practice as part of our preparation for ‘House of Care’

As the patient writing the article says: ‘These appointment had never felt like a two way conversation where I had the space to ask as well as answer questions’. What a wake-up call to all of us who run chronic disease management clinics. This patient felt apologetic raising her goals at the consultation, and this was done at the end of the time with the nurse.

I felt so strongly that the patient goals should be the first, biggest thing about chronic disease management reviews that I took the article in to work, and gave it to our LTC nurses to read. We need to come up with a new language and way of that invites these conversations, that creates this teamwork between clinician and patient naturally.

Healings 2

By Kathleen Jamie from Frissure: Prose Poems and Artworks (2013)

At midnight the north sky is blues and greys, with a thin fissure of citrine just above the horizon. It’s light when you wake, regardless of the hour. At 2 or 4 or 6am, you breathe light into your body.

A rose, a briar rose. A wild rose and its thorned stem. What did Burns say? ‘you seize the flo’er, the bloom is shed’.

To be healed is not to be saved from mortality, but rather, released back into it: we are returned to the wild, into possibilities for ageing and change.

Citizens’ juries

2016 – the year I went to the International Forum of Quality and Safety in Healthcare in Gothenburg. There were many memorable moments. It inspired a passion in me for showcasing quality improvement in primary care and in Scotland. These ambitions are still to be realised.

It also took me to Jönköping where I visited Qulturum, an amazing resource for bringing healthcare improvement ideas into practice. Here is where I first saw a description of a citizen’s jury, and a reasoned explanation for why they are valuable.

Before this, I had only seen single patients being asked about single issues. These lone lay people have attended meetings, to represent all patients, all demographics, all ethnographic minorities, and orientations. The agenda has been set by the medical establishment, and the lay person has been, at best, a commentator. Their participation has allowed organisations to tick the box on patient participation.

A Citizen’s jury changes this. First of all, a group of people get to debate the issues. This gets around the need for one person to represent all demographics. Secondly, this is more than a poll. The jury is provided with facts, as well as well reasoned and possibly opposing expert opinions. Members of the jury develop knowledge about a specific policy area. They may call expert witnesses to present evidence relevant to the issue being explored. Their viewpoint is therefore both independent and well-informed, and not fixed to one demographic.

The BMJ published an analytical article examining how citizens’ juries can review current medical practice. The article looks at the role of these juries in evaluating acceptability and legitimacy of screening policies. Relevant examples are provided.

References:

What the doctor learned

This needs no commentary – just worth reading about the work of being a patient and managing a disease.

https://www.shinecancersupport.org/programmes/read-blog

A brief format to be used when consulting with patients

By Glenn Colquhoun, Playing God: Poems about medicine (2002)

The patient will talk.

The doctor will talk.

The doctor will listen while
the patient is talking.

The patient will listen while
the doctor is talking.

The patient will think that the doctor
knows what the doctor is talking about.

The doctor will think that the patient
knows what the patient is talking about.

The patient will think that the doctor
knows what the patient is talking about.

The doctor will think that the patient
knows what the doctor is talking about.

The doctor will be sure.
The patient will be sure.

The patient will be sure.
The doctor will be sure.

Shouldn’t hurt a bit, should it?

A systematic approach to providing best supportive care.

I earmarked this article https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5017  a year ago as an important analytical piece on using a systematic approach to improve care. It spoke to me about personalising care, and systematising how that is done, and about reducing wasteful variation by targeting resources on care that met patients needs. It also spoke about communication, and assessing patient need based on conversations.

The article tackled something else too; semantics. The authors debated the meaning of the term ‘best supportive care’, and whether it is the same as palliative care. ‘Best supportive care’ is a phrase that comes back to us from MDT meetings, where patient treatment options are systematically reviewed and agreed by experts. Patients who are too unwell, or who reject, active treatment of their cancer are allocated to ‘best supportive care’. What that means, who provides it, and whether it is different to palliative care is all a moot point.

In the responses to the paper, the debate continues; will this term become a euphemism for palliative care? And who decides what best supportive care entails, and who is responsible for delivering it?

Looking at the experience of patients with newly diagnosed lung cancer in Fife, it was clear that something was not right. Patients and those around them described uncertainty about who was overseeing their care. There was a lot of variation in actual care and support provided, but this did not equate to need, and was a product of a lack of a systematic approach.

The system that the team in Fife devised based itself on realistic medicine principals.

While this plan looks only at the care of patients with lung cancer, it could be a blueprint for the development of similar services. For example, on our small patch of the Hebrides, it would be sensible to use this approach for all patients requiring best supportive care.

The plan starts with a comprehensive, patient-centred assessment of need, led by a senior clinician. In Fife, where the team started with lung cancer patients, the assessment was a senior palliative medicine clinician. In the Hebrides, we would have to cut our cloth accordingly, and this may be a cancer care lead GP, or a MacMillan nurse. Our own experience is that patients like to know which GP and MacMillan nurse is overseeing their care. One key feature of the assessment is that it is about exploring understanding, discussing implications, and evolving the conversation towards care planning and support.

The second key step in Fife was communicating with all of the professionals identified in the initial plan, including setting up a Key Information Summary. Communication is so easy to do badly, and makes such a huge difference when done well.

My own experience is that this is an iterative process, and the cycle could easily be repeated as circumstances change. The experience in Fife was that over the first three years of the project, systematic change spread through palliative care service delivery.

A treatment that lacks evidence, does not have a realistic outcome or benefit, or that is not really useful for the patient, is a resource wasted. Saving the patient from unnecessary treatment also saves resources, which can then be redirected into support. The health economics of this change in focus is mentioned, but not described; the authors mention this as a barrier to achieving change, as the savings and investments are across organisations and budgets.

Their argument is that delivering what really matters to patients enables effective clinical care without overuse of resources. We know that sounds right, even if the healthcare economics are hard to pin down.

Control: What is in a name?

The British Medical Journal has sporadic articles under the theme ‘what your patient is thinking. In November 2018, the article was about control, and it was written by a woman called Judith Hendley, who has diabetes.

The article shows us how language in the consulting room can reduce patients to being their condition, a diabetic, a sufferer from diabetes, an unhealthy person, whose job in life is to control the only thing of interest to the clinician, their HBA1C.

She says ‘any kind of open question that allows me to feel understood and supported and not judged for the choices I make about how I manage my condition is more helpful. For example, “How are you feeling about your diabetes at the moment?”, “What is most important to you right now?”, or “What ideas have you thought about for how you could handle that?” ‘

This is where I think we are heading when we move to ‘House of Care‘ – shifting our focus to a style of working where the patient teaches us about their condition, and we help them deal with the important issues and problems that they bring to us.

In a small community, this is probably a bit easier, as we know our patients well as individuals, but the years of QOF have made us slaves to the check-list, the need to get in our questions about control early. Time to break that mould and bring in the new.

The article includes this wise guidance:

  • Listen to the language patients use and try to reflect it back to them in your observations or questions
  • Take the time to find out what matters to your patients—the things that they are worrying about might not be obvious to you
  • Think about the language you use when you are referring to or writing about people with diabetes or other long term conditions—would they find the language you have used empowering or disempowering?

You can read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k3119