Druin Burch

Druin Burch is a consultant physician, a former junior doctor, and the author of books on history and medicine.

The problem with Labour’s plan for ‘NHS Online’

Party conferences are less about conferring than about speeches and announcements. Today Keir Starmer revealed NHS Online, a virtual hospital of vast scope and wonderful promise. Patients will be able to swiftly connect to clinicians at a time and place to suit them. NHS Online, said Starmer, demonstrates that Labour favours ‘renewal’, while Reform only

The problem with Jess’s Rule

NHS England has today introduced Jess’s Rule, asking doctors to take a ‘three strikes and rethink approach’. The rule is named for Jessica Brady, who died in 2020 aged 27, having had more than 20 appointments with her GP surgery in the six months before her death. Mostly seen virtually – a fact attributed to

The no-choice rural restaurant with just two sittings a week

Long Compton is in the Cotswolds, but to the east, where there are no boutique hotels or shops selling artisan candles to tourists. Banburyshire and its surrounds are actual countryside. Fields roll away in the manner Germans call Kulturlandschaft, meaning landscape shaped by centuries of human care. This is the sort of country that makes

How I came to (reluctantly) like Trump

The Donald is in Britain. As a holidaymaker used to budget flights, I associate Stansted airport, where Trump landed last night, with precisely the amount of glamour it currently offers, but I also know it was where planes in distress are directed to on their return – its long runway giving them the best chance

J.K. Rowling is a phenomenal plotter

As I write, a copy of The Hallmarked Man sits beside me. Not being on holiday, spending the morning reading a new detective novel would seem as louche as a pre-brunch martini. Not being David Niven, I’m making the book wait until at least after lunch. J.K. Rowling’s new book, under her pen name of

A farewell to aspirin

At last weekend’s European Society of Cardiology conference in Madrid, a quiet funeral bell tolled for aspirin. The drug has already been largely dropped as a painkiller, on the basis of having more side effects than paracetamol. Most often now it’s taken to prevent a heart attack. Now, a new study, published in the Lancet

Why September feels like the true new year

Gardens are past their best, large spiders are appearing indoors, chill mornings herald coming mists, the days are not so long, and adverts have replaced barbecues with ‘back to school’ offers. Elderberries have turned a purple that fades into black, and soon will drop and stain the ground. The daily commute remains relatively quiet for

Britain can’t win its fight against Big Pharma

Britain has picked a fight with the pharma industry, and it isn’t clear why we think we can win. Not only might NHS costs rise, but we may also lose access to new medications, making our health service increasingly second class and meaning that people die. Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s fight has made headlines and

Why the English fly their flag

For a Brit in America, flag-flying feels so overdone, almost cultish. Why do Americans fly their flag on houses, lawns, even on their lapels? An American friend once gave me a running vest – the garment that over there they call a wifebeater – emblazoned with ‘US Army’. A British veteran I ran with raised

Jeremy Clarkson changed my life

As a good left-wing lad raised by Guardian-reading parents who didn’t drive, I knew Jeremy Clarkson was tasteless and unpleasant. In my first year as a junior doctor, my surgical ward had one of his articles pinned to the office wall. It was off-putting to see his shabby name and a piece from a tabloid,

We need more unemployed doctors

In medicine, the working year begins today, as freshly qualified doctors start and others rotate to new attachments. Mismanagement means that a huge number will, unusually, be unemployed: as late as the end of July, the BMA said a third of all junior doctors had no jobs to go to in August.  Understandably, juniors are

We should raise, not lower, the voting age

Keir Starmer’s decision to lower the voting age to 16 is widely seen as a cynical attempt to secure votes, but the truth is more frightening. Politicians pursuing self-interest are merely cynical; the real menace comes from those committed to utopia, as some Labour types appear to be in their drive to make democracy ‘better’

I’ve come to love the nudist beach

Homer is much praised, but I find him unreliable. The Mediterranean cove in which we were swimming, for example, was not in the least wine-dark. We were turning around and swimming back, the sights on display at the nudist end of the beach having startled the spluttering elegance of my head-above-water breast-stroke. ‘I wouldn’t mind

Jews are good at almost everything. Apart from food

We Jews make up 0.2 per cent of the world’s population but have won 22 per cent of all the Nobel prizes ever awarded. And we have not done this with a tailwind. Mark Twain thought the reason Jews tended to do so well in business was above-average honesty. Jewish success has been so extravagantly

Wes Streeting has learnt nothing from the NHS’s past mistakes

Yesterday, Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer announced a ten-year plan to save the NHS. ‘There are moments in our national story when our choices define who are,’ Streeting explained. ‘Unless the NHS changes, the argument that it is unsustainable will grow more compelling. It really is change or bust. We choose change.’ One wonders whether

The shame of a middle-aged gym-goer

We are told being non-judgemental is a virtue, that discrimination is a vice, and that the avoidance of prejudice is not merely possible but laudable. Perhaps the quickest way to give the lie to these statements is to reveal to you that I am a 53-year-old man who regularly goes to the gym. What are

The flaw in Wes Streeting’s AI NHS app

Speaking at Blackpool Football Club earlier this week, Wes Streeting announced his latest bid to modernise the NHS: bold new additions to the NHS app. Artificial intelligence would be used to empower people, turning them into experts on their own conditions, while another feature would ‘show patients everything from their nearest pharmacy to the best

Respect thine elders

Before the arrival of strawberries, and not long after the coming of the swifts, the elder salutes the coming of summer after its own fashion: emerging from roadsides and hedgerows, gardens and wasteland, and scenting them with its blooms. Almost a century ago, Maud Grieve, in her 1931 Modern Herbal, said ‘that our English summer