As a lawyer I was always fascinated by the difference between the Legal and Medical professions when it came to the Solicitors/GPs getting help for their Clients/Patients from Barristers/Specialists, and how much better the Legal Profession’s system was.
With the Legal Profession, if a Solicitor felt that, for his client to be properly advised, help was needed from a Barrister, it was, “Let’s get an opinion.”
The Solicitor would then brief a Barrister, and when the Barrister’s opinion came back, the Solicitor would then meet with his client again, and provide advice to the client which incorporated what the Barrister had had to say.
There are two important things to note about this.
It would be the Solicitor who dealt with the Barrister, in seeking his advice.
It would be the Solicitor who dealt with the Barrister, in receiving his advice.
With the Medical Profession, it was, “Off you go and see So and So.”
(This, of course, involved the Patient in a second lot of travelling, travelling to see the Specialist – something which clients of Solicitors were never involved in.)
So it would be the Patient who would be seeking advice/help from the Specialist – and you would think they would never do as good a job of this as the GP would do in seeking advice.
And it would be the Patient who would be receiving the advice/help from the Specialist – although, no doubt, these days, the Specialist would email a report to the GP.
Why have we set all this out.
Because we believe that the Medical Profession should follow the lead of the Legal Profession – GPs should be the ones consulting the Specialists, not the patient. To us it’s a nonsense to think that any patient would ever do as well in consulting a Specialist as a GP would.
How would this all come about? Simply, if the GP recommended a Specialist’s consultation, the Patient would say to the GP, “I want you to do the consultation with the Specialist for me.”