Come back Mr Turton – all is forgiven!

I spent five thoroughly enjoyable years as a Senior Registrar at the Royal London Hospital, during an extremely exciting time in orthodontics. The straight wire technique, while frowned upon by the more ‘traditionalist’ orthodontic training establishments, was being championed by Bob Lee, Bob Kirschen, Maurice Berman, and David DiBiase and was taught to all the RLH registrars from the ‘get go’. Philip Turton was the hospital manager, assisted by one secretary and one assistant, and everything worked absolutely fine. The consultants organised everything efficiently and effectively, ably assisted by senior nursing staff. The general feeling was that the clinicians were happy and proud to work for the NHS.

Over the past decades, we have witnessed an exponential rise in the numbers of managers, assistant managers, accountants and procurement ‘specialists’, which in my opinion has drained the money that has been generously allocated to the NHS over the last 30 years. These are changes for which I cannot identify any discernible clinical benefit… and they have certainly done nothing to reduce the 7.7 million patients currently on NHS waiting lists.