There’s a true story making the rounds on social media about a British doctor named Keith Wolverson, a general practitioner working for the National Health Service, who has battled an almost decade-long disciplinary process, having first been suspended for alleged disrespect of a Muslim patient, continuing to work during the suspension, and ultimately being fired.
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The facts are simple enough. The NHS is understaffed, underfunded, and overworked, so doctors need to be efficient. They need to diagnose a patient as quickly as possible, write a prescription, and move on to the next patient. There is always a line; there is always a “next patient” to treat.
In this case, way back in 2018, a Muslim woman with a fully covered face entered his office with a sick child. Due to a combination of her accent and her burka or niqab, he couldn’t understand the mother clearly enough to diagnose the child, so he had to ask her repeatedly to lift her face covering and speak slowly and clearly.
Eventually, she finally agreed to, and the doctor successfully diagnosed and cured the child.
This should have been the end of it, and there would be no news story.
But the mother’s husband made her reconsider the experience – once the child was on the path to recovery, of course – and she filed a complaint against the doctor, claiming that her English is fine and he disrespected her and her “religion” by making her remove the face covering so he could diagnose the child.
The doctor maintains that there’s no prejudice or disrespect involved. Like most people, when you have difficulty understanding someone’s words due to a foreign accent or the muffling of a mask, watching the face and reading the lips helps. A doctor can’t be expected to be a mind-reader, after all; someone has to tell him what the symptoms are.
The review board decided that such a position is insensitive and disrespectful – perhaps the Arabic-speaking members of the board had no trouble at all understanding her — and they suspended Dr. Wolverson. But the NHS still desperately needed his service, so he continued to accept shifts as ordered, in violation of the suspension, as he understandably assumed all was forgiven.
When his management finally stopped calling him in for shifts, and he accepted this suspension and stopped working, the regulators decided this caused him to be out of practice (they call it “deskilling”), therefore making him no longer desirable as an employee. This April, the British press reported that he’d finally been fired, not for cause, but essentially for having obeyed an unreasonable suspension.
One lesson, perhaps, is that we need to view our jobs differently. We may think our job as a doctor is to cure the patient, our job as an accountant is to calculate the customer’s taxes, our job as a taxi driver is to drive to the destination, our job on an assembly line is to build a product. But we are mistaken.
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Rather, in this brave new world, our job, first and foremost, is to show the proper amount of respect to protected classes, no matter what. Time is of no essence; our work doesn’t even matter: one must show deference to the protected class, and if that causes a business to fail, a deadline to be missed, or a patient to die, that’s fine as long as the protected class was fully “respected.”
Another lesson may be that when a government bureaucracy demonstrates conflicting priorities, first look out for your own self-interest. This doctor shouldn’t have cared that the NHS was understaffed when he was on suspension; he shouldn’t have cared about all the sick patients who wouldn’t be seen if he respected the suspension and stayed home. He should have protected his own job, refusing the shifts he was asked to cover, rather than risking his job to protect the lives and health of strangers. Such altruism just isn’t valued in today’s United Kingdom.
Another lesson, especially clear to us here in the States, watching from far away, is how destructive the recent torrential flood of illegal aliens has been to the British way of life.
Many have wondered why the long-dominant major parties of the UK — the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats etc. — have all collapsed over the past year, and the one sane populist party known as Reform UK has skyrocketed to the top. This story illustrates the reason. Native, sane, normal Britons – the “normies” — see how the priorities of the bureaucracy have been contorted under the leadership of the establishment, and they are ready to overthrow the corruptokrats and give sensible folk like Nigel Farage a chance (though, tragically, the next national parliamentary election is likely three long years away, and the public knows that everything may be too far gone to be fixable by then).
Yet another key lesson concerns the mentality of these new arrivals, as their culture requires them to take offense when a professional is just trying to cure their child. We see this happen globally; the face-covering requirement trumps all other aspects of a functioning society, from diagnosing an illness to running an honest election, from identifying a criminal suspect to ensuring an honest transaction. The hidden face is paramount, all other societal concerns be damned.
Note too that the story reveals a key shortcoming of the socialist system. The people wanted “free” (taxpayer-funded) healthcare, which requires that a bureaucracy writes the rules and you get the doctor who’s on shift when you arrive, whether he speaks your language or not. If it were a free country, where you weren’t taxed to death and could afford to choose your own doctor, you could pick a doctor who speaks your language and whose wife wears the same burka. But these immigrants chose the UK, and the UK chose the NHS. Perhaps more than one choice here was errant.
One final point stands out: the rule of law has been turned on its head. We all know how employment law is supposed to work, and we know that any sane country would recognize the doctor’s honorable intent here and deem the original complaint frivolous. But the legal system that ought to have protected the doctor instead champions the unreasonable complainant. The power structure in Britain has been turned upside down and now sides with the forces of destruction instead of protecting a society that was, at one time, among the great civilizations of the world.
Pray that we learn these lessons on this side of the Pond before it gets that bad here. We are already too far along that path.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international trade compliance trainer, public speaker, and consultant at The Trade Compliance Coach. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his biting political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his collection of essays on public policy in the 2020s, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, exclusively on Amazon.
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Image: NHS