Abstract
Your Editorial 1 and the comments in the Podium 2 together with the rather sad responses by some patients and some doctors reported in the same issue (December 2008) stimulated us to put forward the views of a couple of doctors of an earlier generation.
Like Professor Aziz Sheikh we see the need to re-kindle the human side of medicine, as so poetically expounded by William R Phillips, while at the same time, like Professor Antonio Vaz Carneiro, never forgetting for one moment that effective treatment must always be based on the best available evidence.
Perhaps a change worth considering would be setting up, by means of donations, of one or two free hospitals treating all comers and staffed by men and women primarily motivated by faith, whether religious or humanitarian. Such institutions might help to draw together, as donors, hospital workers and as patients, members of various communities and improve their understanding of and respect for each other. At the same time such institutions could set compassionate holistic standards of care to which NHS institutions might be stimulated to aspire.
Footnotes
DECLARATIONS