Audio Clip

(2:01)
Sir John Crofton
TB and the NHS

History of NHSScotland – Public Health Challenges – Improving Public Health - Tuberculosis

So we inherited a lot of patients with resistant bugs, by good organisation we got rid of our waiting list in a year and developed a formula and all our five consultants had their own teams and we made a formula which included both social priority and medical priority. Socially - for children of the family for instance, we gave them a high priority to come into hospital for a positive solution, and the other priority was how ill the patient was.

Someone on your team knew every patient on your waiting list, so we would meet every week and we got rid of our waiting list in a year and then it went steadily down after that as the number of new cases decreased. So it was very exciting. I remember sitting down together with the consultants saying this is going to take twenty years, but in fact we got it effectively under control within six years. If there had been no NHS would it have worked? It might have been much more difficult if the previous system had been in place. I think it has been marvellous, seeing the situation before and hearing about it from patients from all sorts of walks of life in the army and you get some idea of what it was like.

Seeing the slum situation, I was a student during the depths of the depression in Lambeth and I was sitting in on the paediatric outpatient - you were ashamed to go and eat your dinner. It was terrible, everything was terribly grim. I have often said people are so much more important than systems and if you have really good people they make the worst system work and if you don’t have good people they won’t make the best system work. So you do need both.