Coming towards the final phase of a career in general practice I had hardly expected the ghost of Margot Jefferys to return to haunt me. Jefferys was a distinguished professor of sociology at London University and lectured at the Diploma of Public Health courses at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the 1960s. She was a good and thought provoking lecturer, but I have never forgiven her for the derisory mark given for an essay she had set with the approximate title, 'Targeting of health care—universal or personal provision." The DPH, then about to be replaced by an MSc in health care, was a marvellous course for any budding general practitioner, but by the end of it I was convinced, despite the best efforts of Professor Jefferys, that one of the principal roles of a general practitioner was to try to harness and coordinate all the appropriate strands of support for an individual patient: in other words to provide a bespoke service from the rather intimidating and hugely complicated NHS bureaucracy. Such an approach was obviously quite against the 1960s' sociological dogma and no quarter and certainly no credence was given for the arguments I put forward in what, I thought, was a spirited defence of man against mammon.
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