Despatches is a new blog from the Adam Smith Institute featuring insights from a senior NHS doctor who has returned to a hospital to support the fight against COVID19.

We believe in these difficult times it is important to provide a platform for a wide array of perspectives: to show diversity of thought, opinion, and experience.

Friedrich A. Hayek explains, in The Use of Knowledge in Society, that useful knowledge “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess”. 

In that spirit, we believe this blog will offer an important perspective on what is happening within the UK’s National Health Service. This ‘bottom up’ view will naturally be different from those we normally hear from — those at the top of the system. We to expand understanding of what is happening on the ground. This is one real personal perspective at one particular hospital. The views are those of this doctor, and may not reflect those of the ASI’s staff, fellows or directors. 

This doctor is writing under the condition of anonymity. We shall call him Dr Smith.

The first three posts are now up on the blog, and previews can be seen below. More posts coming in over the next few days.

How should we decide who gets treatment?

The hospital is now almost full – the constant drip drip of Coronavirus patients hour-by-hour, shift-by-shift is taking its toll. After almost two weeks of eerie quiet, the last couple of days has seen a significant acceleration in the number of patients arriving.

Read the full post >

Are antibody tests and immunity certificates the path towards the exit?

Young patients I meet in A&E clearly want to know if they have the virus - Despite the lock down it is surprising how many young patients with classic coronavirus symptoms just want to drop by and ‘get checked up’ – by which there is a heavy hint that they also expect to get tested. It is already interesting to watch the doctors and nurses trying not to vocalise their thoughts – ‘just go home and stop adding to our workload’, ‘yes the virus makes you feel bloody awful but we don’t have any cure’.

Read the full post >

A long shift

It has been the end of another long shift – filling of the hospital with elderly patients has led to some desperately sad scenes. Entire rooms of patients drenched in sweat, struggling to breathe, and entirely without visitors who remain banned except for perhaps those right at the end of their lives.

Read the full post >