Living in a different world....

Everything is the same, yet everything is also different! It's good to be back to seeing (some) patients face to face. Clearly the world of remote consultations has moved things on for both our patients and ourselves, with less travelling and waiting in outpatients. But the virtual world is limited and it’s harder to show empathy – and I have the nagging concern that I am missing something. There is some way to go to get the balance right.

In the past nine months we have lived through the emergence of COVID-19 and our attempts to understand and manage it, and are now working to try to restore the reduced, or suspended, services and clear the backlog. All this just as we go into the run up to winter. As the Executive Director on call this weekend it has been tight with bed pressures, large ambulance conveyances, some difficulties with staff absence due to illness or self-isolating, pressures on the ‘green pathway’ for elective surgery and so on. It's going to be a tough six months for everybody.