Men's breakfast talk
I am a man of many lives.
Depending upon who you are, or when you see me, I could adopt any one of a variety of different guises.
If you were to ask my daughters, then I am daddy, dad or dada. I do boring things around the house, but also play, read stories and go on holiday with them. I give hugs and kisses and tickles and pretend to be a troll when walking over bridges bellowing 'who's trip-trapping over my bridge?' I actually did that once coming over the bridge on the river where the train line crosses over, and as I ran out the other side with my then 5yr old daughter running away and screaming, there was a little old lady on the other side who nearly had a heart attack. She jumped and yelled. Apparently she thought there was a train falling off the bridge. No, just a middle aged man pretending to be a troll.
If you ask the dog walkers around my home, then I am the man who walks or runs with the black Labrador called Monty. They won't know my name.
If you ask members of the 9.30 congregation at St Mary's, then I am the guitar playing worship leading Christian they see at the front. They will know me as Jon, but might not know my surname, or even that I am married to Rachael, the youth and children's worker.
If you ask people in Winsford, a number will know me as Dr Griffiths. The GP from Swanlow surgery. They might not know my first name, they probably don't know that I am a Christian, or that I play the guitar, have a dog or like to go out running.
If you ask local GPs and healthcare managers, then I am Jon Griffiths. Chair of NHS Vale Royal CCG.
Twitter knows me a Dr Jon Griffiths, writer of blogs about healthcare issues.
And so it goes on.
Are we not all like that, with multiple lives and personas?
When talking about running a men's breakfast Stephen and I wondered what kind of theme to run with and decided on inviting men from St Mary's to talk about their 'other lives', our working title was 'on Monday I will be...' So for this first one you get me, talking about how on Monday I will be a doctor.
Let me tell you a little bit more about what I do.
I actually have two jobs, on Monday and Tuesday I work as a GP in Winsford. I get to work for about 8am and start seeing patients, one every 10 minutes at 8.30. Apart from a 20 min break part way through the morning, I carry on until about 11.50am. Then I have home visits. Maybe 1, maybe more, maybe none. I can be out for anything up to an hour or more. I have lunch at my desk and time to do 'paperwork' (actually almost all computer work) until afternoon surgery between 3 and 6pm. If I'm lucky I will be done about 6.30pm, and home by 7pm.the paperwork bit is worth mentioning again, this is not insignificant, and involves looking at blood results, letters from hospital and internal emails from the staff with queries from or about patients. There is no 'down time' during the day, and don't think that the paperwork is not as important as the consultations. We need to consider communication about your health as a key form of care. I cannot care for you without knowing what has taken place at your recent hospital visit.
So that's my job as a GP. Seeing patients both in the surgery and in their own homes, listening, examining, diagnosing and treating. During my first ever job as a newly qualified doctor in Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, my Senior Registrar used to stir me into action by saying 'come on Jonathan, it's time to save lives and stamp out disease.' I still use that phrase a lot, but not so much when I've had a morning seeing runny noses and ingrowing toenails. The life of a GP isn't always glamorous, and when you have knelt down on a slightly grubby carpet to examine the rash on the buttocks of your elderly patient, only for them to then break wind in your face, you do start wondering if this is the right vocation for you.
But how many if you know what a CCG is, or what it means to be chair of the CCG?
Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) were set up as part of the health reforms. They are made up of groups of GP practices coming together as membership organisations to commission healthcare services for the local population. They are largely chaired by GPs, and I chair the Vale Royal CCG covering Winsford and Northwich. We have a budget of £120m to spend on buying services including drugs which GPs prescribe, most local hospital services, mental health services and community services such as district nurses or occupational therapists. I do this job on Wednesdays, Thursdays and on Friday mornings. It usually involves dealing with a huge in box of emails and meeting after meeting. As Chair I lead the organisation. I am, amongst other things the public face of the CCG. If you go to our website you will see my smiling face on the home page. When we have public meetings, I will almost certainly be speaking. I am involved in setting the strategy and the direction of travel for the CCG, and for helping to lead us there.
This week I have had meetings about how to better engage with our member GP practices, about how to look at better prescribing of medicines, about how to reduce mortality rates at the hospital, about how to better integrate care for patients both within the NHS and with social care and about how to spend our £120m next year on hospital, mental health and community services. I have also written a blog and been interviewed for Independent Living magazine for their podcast about the day I spent in a wheelchair last March.
I love it, but I get accused of only being a proper doctor on Monday and Tuesday. People sometimes think that managerial NHS work is not as important as clinical NHS work, but I disagree. As a GP I see patients face to face. I make a difference to them individually, one patient at a time. When I work with my GP colleagues in the practice we can look to make a difference to the whole of our practice population, which is 10,000 patients. As CCG chair I hope to make a positive difference to the patients in our whole CCGS area. That's 100,000 patients.
So that's me during the week. That's the Jon Griffiths you don't get to see.
How does me being a Christian fit in with that?
I want to talk about a couple of things, using examples from what we know of the life of Jesus. I want to talk about compassion and leadership.
Who knows the shortest verse in the Bible? John 11:35 'Jesus wept'. This is part of the story of the death of Lazarus and his subsequent resurrection by Jesus. Lazarus is ill, and his sisters send for Jesus, who takes his time, then arrives too late. Lazarus has died. When Jesus sees the grieving relatives and friends, he also cries.
I find this passage perplexing in some ways. Jesus knew he was about to raise Lazarus to life. He knew how this will end, and if you read the whole passage starting at the beginning of chapter 11 it is clear he knew this from when the sisters first sent for him. So, why does he cry? Why doesn't he just say, 'hey, come on guys, watch this, you can stop crying now!'?
I think the answer is compassion. The dictionary definition is 'sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others'. Even though he knew he was about to out it right, Jesus had compassion. He saw the suffering, he felt the pain. He responded as a human would. He wept.
I see suffering and misfortune all the time. Sometimes I can put it right. Sometimes I cannot. I can always have compassion. As a Christian, this is a lesson I understand. This is something I can learn from Jesus. He has compassion for those around him, he shows care to friends and strangers alike. You find him treating all equally and at home in the houses of all classes of society.
He is the perfect role model.
Which brings me nicely onto leadership. Jesus provides us with an example of leadership which is radical and transformative. Above all he leads by example. 'Follow me', he says, and people do. He does not ask us to do anything he has not already done himself. And he serves. His model of leadership is not a top down management hierarchy. How many leaders in your work place can often be found on their knees, washing feet?
If I want an example of someone who can keep me grounded, and make me a better doctor, and a better healthcare manager, keep in the patient at the centre of what I am trying to do, leading by example, being prepared to get involved and get my hands dirty, then surely I need look no further than the example of Jesus. So, I try to lead by example as well. That's why I try to keep fit and have been trying to lose weight. That's why I did Movember. That's why I got involved with NHS ChangeDay and spent a day in a wheelchair last year. When one of our CCG managers recently left for another job he said on his final day that one thing he had learned about me was that I was basically 'up for anything'. If it will help to improve healthcare for the people of Vale Royal, then I hope that he is right.
I have one final thing to say. I talked at the start about having multiple lives. There is another thing here I can learn from Jesus. Jesus didn't have multiple lives. He wasn't divine one minute, and human the next. He was, at all times fully human, and fully divine.
I am not really Dr Griffiths one minute, and Jon the Christian the next. I am both of those things all of the time, as well as all of my other personas as well. Being a Christian should govern my life at all times, whether in Church, in the consulting room, or in a meeting about hospital services. I am constantly looking to do that.
