Dialogue: Patients should be more important than salaries

LOUISA HERD* has little sympathy for general practitioners when they complain about their annual income dropping below six figures.

So the poor doctors earn only $90,000 a year. Gosh, I sobbed into my latte when I read that. The thought of it - training all those years to work long hours and for such a measly reward. Just like the rest of us. Oh dear.

What's up, doc? Do you think you are worth more? How much? Do you realise that you are earning up to three times the average wage of your patients, whose hours may be just as long? Do they think you're worth it?

Hands up, all you ordinary folk who have always had a good relationship with your medical adviser? Good on you. Now, hands up everyone that's been subjected to, considering it as a service, a bit of a bum deal from your GP?

I think back five years to my discharge from hospital after a full abdominal hysterectomy. That night, I developed severe cystitis with an agonising pain that caused me to lose consciousness. The doctor couldn't be bothered coming out. Golly gosh, he thought medicine was a 9-to-5 job.

My youngest son was crying one day from a nasty infection under his toenail. I took him to see a GP. She wouldn't even look at his toe, let alone touch it, and prescribed antibiotics by divination. Oh dear, do you mean, I actually have to touch people? Ooh, icky.

Another flower of the medical profession chewed gum all through my "consultation" with her, wouldn't engage in any eye contact and sat rattling keys on her computer the entire time.

The sister of a friend was told repeatedly that the lump in her breast was nothing to worry about. You're too young for it to be cancerous, dear. It'll go away if you have a baby. It's a hormonal thing.

That young woman was dead within a year. By the time her all-knowing doctor decided to send her on for a specialist examination, the cancer had spread.

Doctors are indispensable, valuable members of our community. Yet all too often I hear tales like these which make me pause before getting too indignant on behalf of our poorly paid GPs.

The days of Dr Finlay and his casebook are gone. His avuncular friendliness has been replaced by some hotshot young medico who knows heaps about coughs, colds and sore holes, but damn all about how to behave to his or her patients in a non-patronising, empathetic way.

So, sorry doc, I just can't see what you are bleating about. We crucify carpenters on Fair Go, spies pillory plumbers on Target but we never see Ian Orchard rating doctors on their bedside manners.

The public has little opportunity to complain about poor service from doctors or, more importantly, to get anything done about it. Along with teaching, medicine appears one of the last bastions of well-covered-up mediocrity.

For every caring family doctor worth his or her weight in gold, there are 10 arrogant twits who went through medical school all fired up on Shortland Street.

We all provide a service of some kind and, yes, we would all like to be paid more. But certain professionals, trading on the feel-good factor, think they have an entitlement to a bigger suck at the orange than the rest of us.

Doctors used to be held in high regard and they deserved it. But not now. There are too many inattentive, insensitive GPs playing with their computers and writing prescriptions without looking at or talking to their patients. There are too many young folk with no life-experience going into medicine because Daddy is a doctor and it seems a waste of a fancy private education not to follow in his footsteps.

There are too many major medical blunders.

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I've always thought medicine was a vocation, not a job. I don't advocate doctors living like monks, dedicated to their profession and grateful for the few shekels flung at them by thankful patients. But neither is it a line of work that one enters mainly to earn big bikkies.

I'm sorry, guys, but $90,000 a year sounds like pretty hot potatoes to me.

* Louisa Herd is a Wellsford writer.