Professor
Sir Graeme Catto
President
General
Medical Council
Dear
Sir,
I
am writing with respect to changes recently made in
the ‘Good Medical Practice’ document, the latest edition of which I
received on
the 20th January.
As
a practising physician since 1988, I have valued
the GMC’s guidance documents and viewed with considerable respect the
care and
sagacity with which it has navigated difficult and changing waters.
I
preface my comment with a short personal
background. I am a Christian, and after
coming to faith in Jesus the Messiah, the pursuit of His glorious
example
inspired me to practise medicine. I have since often been invited to
preach in
churches of many different kinds in this country and overseas, and have
also
participated in open air evangelistic preaching for my own church and
for that
of others, and count that a sacred privilege. This of course is no
novelty, it
is the very bedrock of a huge number if not the majority of our
hospitals,
given that so many of them are actually named after the Lord, His
apostles and
disciples, whose primary labour was identical.
It
has been also a great pleasure and stimulation to
serve some 5 and a half years as a physician in the Middle East,
including
during the second Gulf War, and back in the NHS since 2004 again to
work, think
through and discuss difficult cases with colleagues of a breathtaking
variety
of backgrounds. I have held a consultant’s post as a locum since that
time. My wife
is not British born, nor are many members of my family, and my church
welcomes
and contains people from all kinds of backgrounds – some of whom lived
in very
degraded circumstances before knowing Jesus Christ.
It
is a solemn duty and honour to help and minister to
the sick of every conceivable background, and as a physician, I have
endeavoured with God’s help to care for soldiers of causes I oppose,
convicted
criminals, adulterers, drug addicts and many others, as compassionately
and firmly as I
would
my own family if they fell into such a state. I have sought to put
aside an
abhorrence of the harm and injury to themselves or others, of their
political
or ethical views, or their personal degradation. I have not received
any
indication from patients that they have judged this determined
impartiality
unsuccessful – quite the contrary.
I
have no difficult endorsing the changes that have
been made in paragraph 7.
However
there is a sharp distinction between duty of
service to patients and the effects that similar changes to the code in
paragraph 46 are likely to have on future medical practice. It is
remarkable
that these new clauses on diversity are the only ones with an
immediate,
explicit encouragement by the profession to police itself. Promoting
diversity
appears to have become more important to GMC than financial corruption
or
sexual misconduct, as yet unaccompanied by such exhortations to report
and
reprove colleagues’ transgressions of the code. Even the sections
dealing with
frank incompetence are handled more circumspectly. Is the most
intolerable
offence of all now intolerance, even intolerance of sin? It is well the
body
has not learned this wisdom.
The
distinction between articles 7 and 46 can easily
be highlighted by the difference between treating a Jehovah’s Witness,
a common
but important source of heartache, and the almost inconceivable
nonsense of
working with an openly declared Jehovah’s Witness as a practising
physician
colleague on an acute take. Again just as there is an increasing
tendency of
some stricter Muslim patients to refuse medication because it contains gelatin, what about a physician who felt
similarly
conscience bound to delegate the task of prescribing such ‘unclean’
medications
to other colleagues? The GMC will be aware this issue is not
theoretical. Dr Abdul Majed
Katme’s
(? Kadom, reg. no. 2778275), of the
Islamic
Medical Association, has issued a public call for patients to shun
‘unholy’
vaccinations[1]
– is the GMC considering this extremely serious initiative which may
lead to
infant death and morbidity, or will the weight of article 46 now take
precedence? Unnecessary dilemmas of this nature are likely to
proliferate.
Given
the well documented tendency of certain minority
groups to play up their victimhood in order to gain public sympathy and
recognition, it is regrettable that the precise definition of
‘harassment’ or
‘bullying’ has not been specified more clearly. Especially since to
harass may
be defined as simply as to ‘irritate continually’ – a criterion based
on
subjective perception, which many may be to tempted to apply to
existing
colleagues! Christians would explicitly repudiate harassment and
bullying in
the workplace, nevertheless it is relatively easy to envisage an
occasion where
an accusation founded on these articles might arise from a legitimate
use of
discrimination. What is ‘unfair’ discrimination? – it
sounds reasonable, but what does it amount to in practice?
To
take some extreme examples, would the GMC now
regard a candidate who declares himself a Satanist, worships the Prince
of
deceit, drinks chicken blood, and engages in orgiastic rituals, widely
rumoured
to involve minors and prostitutes, suitable for a doctor’s post? If
not, how is
it that the judgement is solely founded on his (or her)
private
religious practise? If so, then the failure to discriminate has lead to
a state
of tolerance more akin to the effects of HIV than to integrity or
wisdom. He
(she) might justifiably argue a refusal of a post amounted to
discrimination on
the grounds of faith. Most of the British public of all communities
would
regard it as lunacy not to regard such an applicant with grave caution,
on the
sole basis of religious profession.
Again,
would the GMC regard a jihadist
who openly admires Bin Laden, praises the atrocities of 9/11 – as a
good
proportion of my patients did whilst I served overseas – a suitable
candidate
as a nurse for a post requiring complex unsupervised tasks in my unit?
If not,
then again this ‘intolerance’ is rooted in the candidate’s radical
religious
principles alone. Many of my medical and nursing colleagues in the
Middle East
were Muslim, some of them were excellent and highly respected for their
skills,
whom I still miss keenly, yet most were swift to distinguish between
religious
fanatics and moderates in a way the GMC apparently now is not. The
shutting
down of discernment in the way that ‘Good Medical Practice’ is now
recommending
appears both illogical and imprudent. Effective medical practice
requires the
proper discrimination of signs of disease, so also in the realm of
moral and
religious thinking its complete disregard is unsafe.
Gay
rights advocates have been militant and determined
in shaping public opinion and hammering through their agenda even for
adoption
rights and equivalence of civil partnerships with marriage. Holy
Scripture
describes even the affections which undergird homosexual orientation as
‘vile’
(Romans 1.26), and analyses the process of godlessness which results in
homosexual
practice, crown in a family of vices (v.18-32). What British law
defined as an imprisonable crime less than
40 years ago, a practice
marked as harmful to society, considerably more dangerous to health
than
smoking and degrading to the integrity and character of the young, is
now
enshrined by the GMC, along with altogether worthy aspects of
diversity, like
disability and race. It is equally immune from criticism, and now
sanctified
from critical scrutiny. Have we so far surpassed the moral
wisdom of
our forebears as to kick over the traces like this? In humble and
imperfect
submission to the Divine Law that has formed the foundation of British Law, I judge and preach the opposite, along with
many
others.
Now
I believe most of my colleagues know my position
on the unique sanctity of marriage, on fornication, adultery, idolatry
and
homosexuality, and I have had good working relationships with most of
them and
entertain hostile terms with none, including those embedded in these
sins. As
the gentle martyr John Bradford loved to say, ‘there but for the grace
of God
go I’. However by continuing to preach
publicly for
repentance from such evil and the liberating power of Christ, albeit
out of the
hospital, there is a high likelihood that sooner or later I will face
allegation founded on the new article 46.
Is
frank and compassionate reproof now apparently
regarded as proper occasion for discipline by the GMC? (Lev.19.17-18
- the true context of the golden Law of love). How subversive of
the
moral character of our profession such a position will prove to be.
What an
awful tragedy it will prove to be for a great institution like the GMC
thus to
discount Divine Law, as mere ‘personal opinion’, in exchange for
political
expediency in embracing the blind and crumbling policy of
multi-cultural
equivalence. Will it even safeguard the communal cohesion it aspires to?
If
ultimately I am forced to choose between my
profession and conscience, as others have been before me in previously
less
enlightened regimes, it will be an honour to follow the One after whose
disciples so many of our best and brightest institutions were named in
days of
much clearer moral vision,
Yours
sincerely in Christ,
Charles
Soper
Physician
