It’s Christmas, so there must be an Agatha Christie adventure on the telly – or some other whodunnit, with somebody’s favourite detective tracking down the culprit and the rest of us at home guessing at the solution before it’s all revealed. Harmless fun.
Today, a thank you to all those who do the detective work of a different kind. The GP who first spots the clues of something significant that needs more skilled investigation. The lab technicians reading the blood samples for familiar – or not so familiar – evidence of things that are not the way we want them to be. The consultants who read the signs in the person in front of them, following first one lead and then another, as many as it takes to get on the right trail and identify what’s doing harm and how it can be caught, stopped.
The patient may also have some hunches about what is happening, reading their own evidence, knowing what the scene usually looks and feels like and how it might now be out of kilter. A wise detective will recruit all the help they can get and conversations with the patient could provide key pieces of the jigsaw and make the picture clearer.
It doesn’t always work as it could, for whatever reasons. The system is under ridiculous pressure. Resources stretched beyond belief, functioning too often on the extra generosity and compassion of committed staff who have already given above and beyond all reasonable time and energy. And, sometimes, people simply get things wrong.
Yet when this team work well with each other, listening, looking, considering and paying careful, caring attention, incredible scenes can become evident, almost invisible agents identified, tracked, apprehended and stopped. Harm can be reduced and, at best, reversed and full lives restored and set free again.
Those forensic detectives who can track and identify a culprit years after the crime through the tiniest samples of DNA, have their match in many of our hospitals. And, in many cases, they both have continually improving technology to help.
Pause Agatha for a moment while we give heartfelt thanks to the less televised detectives of health care…from the GP’s surgery all along the pathway as far as it needs to go…they are working on it today…essential team members in the organ transplant universe.