Speaking truth to power: a tribute to Sandy Macara

Sandy Macara could forgive almost any fault in people, but would go after a bad idea with an axe. There were those, especially in government, who had trouble reconciling the slight, urbane, radiantly optimistic clergyman’s son with the fiery, eloquent denunciations he delivered. Most famously, he asked in 1995 why so many doctors were abandoning medicine, the country or both. His answer: ‘We are labouring under an alien regime. Not so much an internal market as an infernal bazaar in which considerations of cost reign supreme, while concerns for value and values are relegated to second place.’ But he later stressed that the health secretary who presided over it, Virginia Bottomley, was ‘highly sympathetic to us … trapped in an ideological mould set by her government’. He said he liked and respected everyone in that office whom he met. It appealed to the best in them, he said. There was no contradiction, at least not in Sandy’s mind. Growing up as the son of a Church of Scotland minister in Ayrshire, where his home felt like public property, he said ‘you either got on with everybody or you didn’t survive’. However, public health doctors like Sandy knew that a single government policy for good or ill could touch thousands of lives. Good ideas needed to be championed, bad ones strangled as quickly as possible. A stammerer in his youth — he once joked that being called ‘Sir Sandy’ reminded him of it &m...
Source: BMA News - Category: UK Health Source Type: news