‘Top doc on attack’, the Sun screamed; ‘Britons digging their own graves’, the Mail warned.
The directness of the language used by RCGP chairman Steve Field in his call for patient responsibility certainly caught the media’s attention.
Even if he was saying nothing new about the realities GPs face everyday, his call for messages to be ‘brutal’ and to address the ‘hard facts’ had journalists hooked.
Speaking to Channel 4 News, Professor Field said GPs should not pander to people sensitivities. ‘When you see fat parents with fat children being dragged along behind them, what lives have those children got in the future? They’ve got a life of diabetes and heart disease. Really, we need to be quite brutal sometimes with the messages.’
In his letter to the Observer, Professor Field acknowleged the difficulty of balancing patients’ sensibilities and ‘telling them hard facts about their personal behaviours that are ultimately shortening lives’. But his comments are part of a growing view that protecting sensibilities leaves the brutal facts of the matter ignored.
His letter comes hot on the heels of his last foray into the media wolfpack, when he was subject to ‘vitriolic’ criticism after supporting health minister Anne Milton’s proposal that patients be called ‘fat’, rather than ‘obese’.
The way in which the direct language of his attack on waning personal responsibility has woken up the media certainly strengthens the view that pussy-footing around issues is failing to address the ‘brutal’ problems we are storing up for ourselves and our children.
