The Perils of Industrialised Healthcare

David Zigmond is a veteran NHS medical practitioner who has, increasingly, devoted himself to repersonalising the NHS. This has been fuelled by his perception of the last three decades of serial reforms and systematisations: each seems to squeeze yet more intelligence, life and humanity from our healthcare interactions - both with colleagues and patients. Zigmond has worked as a frontline NHS doctor for the better (and worst) part of fifty years. His two main jobs have been as a traditional small practice family doctor and a large hospital psychiatrist and psychotherapist: in all of these he came to see (the now-imperilled) personal continuity of care as vital to much of our best care. Throughout this time he has spent the smaller fraction of his time working as a private psychotherapist. For many years Zigmond has written about his wide-ranging experiences and his ideas of how to make sense of them. This has been contiguous to his teaching of healthcarers and psychotherapists.