I must be mad
Saturday, December 7, 2013 at 9:25 Writing for Conservative Home this week LBC presenter Iain Dale declared:
I must be mad. I have just accepted an invitation to give a lecture on the NHS to 50 doctors, surgeons and consultants from a London hospital in late January. Why on earth can’t I just learn to say “no”? I don’t do a lot of speeches nowadays ... So when this invitation came in my instinct was to say “no” on the basis that it would involve too much preparation time, and that I wasn’t enough of an expert on the subject.
But then I thought, well, that’s never stopped me before and, frankly, I have learned a huge amount about the NHS from all the time I spend talking to people about it and getting them to give their experiences on my radio show. So I’ve chosen as my title 'The NHS: Things That Need to be Said'. That should give me enough rope to hang myself ... All ideas welcome.
This struck a chord because I recently received an invitation to speak at the Policy Forum for Wales Keynote Seminar: Improving health and wellbeing - public health programmes, legislation and integration, also in January.
Other speakers, I learned, are:
- Dr Sara Hayes, Director of Public Health, Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board
- Rhianon Urquhart, Senior Health Improvement Officer, Caerphilly County Borough Council
- Professor Stephen Monaghan, UK Board and Executive Member, The Faculty of Public Health (Royal Colleges of Physicians of the UK) and Consultant in Public Health Medicine, Public Health Wales
- Dr Graham Moore, Research Fellow, DECIPHer UKCRC Public Health Research Centre of Excellence, Cardiff University
There will also be a "senior representative" of the food and drink industry.
Like Iain my instinct was to say "no". But I hate saying "no", so I said "yes".
I must be mad.
Reader Comments (3)
Like Daniel into the lions' den!
"a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity" - the WHO's ambitious definition of health striven for by public health policies.
What a pity it seems to have boiled down to the bullying and harassment of individuals by arrogant public health officials who, no doubt, themselves fall far short of Ideal Personkind.
Anyway, good luck and thank you for continuing to stand up against the bullies. I'd love it if you could ask them what impact stigmatisation and marginalisation have on mental health and how social exclusion enhances social well being.
Personally, I felt that public health's mission was done when they sorted out the water supply.
Call me antagonistic but the more hostile an audience the more motivated I am to speak. Always happy to poke a stick into a hornet's nest.
When I spoke a couple of years ago at the BMJ sponsored "Is smoking a disease or habit?" The audience mostly made up of smoking cessation professionals, listened, to be fair politely, as I made some hopefully telling points on how useless state intervention was and NRT.
A great spoof anti-smoking sketch from the onion!