Care and Compassion. Dedication. Resilience. Adaptability. Crisis management. Continued learning. Family and community based holistic care. Above all a keen interest and mutual respect for her team and patients. So many wonderful foundations for an excellent example of what many of us want from “our doctor”. One of the best books about medicine that I have read. The patients’ stories are vivid, moving, often unforgettable. Polly Morland has written with incredible sensitivity, appreciation and descriptive ability about the valley and the people who live there. Professor Roger Jones OBE Next is a man who has recently suffered a debilitating stroke, but in a perfunctory external assessment has been declared fit for work, and so will lose his right to universal credit against the advice of the doctor and specialist. He’s not sure where to turn. Another letter is written, and while he is there, the doctor also treats him for dermatitis.

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland | Baillie Gifford Prize A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland | Baillie Gifford Prize

Christina Patterson, Sunday Times The doctor's kindly, holistic approach - she makes time to investigate her patients' social as well as physical needs - seems to evoke a lost world . . . Morland's book contains a profound message for the future at a critical moment for general practice and us all. This focus on the whole person, while valuable in all medical disciplines, is bread-and-butter work for GPs. Their role as the keeper of patients’ stories is what most of them love about their job, or what they used to. Because the world has turned, and with it the dynamics of primary care. Few of us attending the doctors’ surgery these days expect to see the same GP twice. We don’t know our doctors like we used to, and they don’t know us, a situation only compounded by Covid and the default to remote consultation. Shared stories have, in many cases, given way to medical transactions. As patient numbers have risen, speed of access to a doctor – any doctor – has become the overriding priority

Do away with the local doctor, her bike and wellies, her familiar car, her listening ear, her “accumulated knowledge” of yourself, your family and circumstances, a doctor you say hello to on the street, who recognises you “as a person, rather than a pathology” – remove her, and our whole heath system collapses too. I only realised that Polly Morland wrote ‘The Society of Timid Souls’ which I absolutely loved when I got the Fortunate Woman home. It was one of the few books that made it to my new book shelves when I moved house. Her second book is no less compelling or beautiful. A Fortunate Woman is a portrait of a dedicated GP who has been rooted in her village community for decades. She’s the successor to a more eccentric doctor who’s life was detailed in another book written decades ago called ‘A fortunate man’ It’s makes the case for continuity of care, the quiet joy of community and how neighbourliness enriches our lives. Vivid case studies of the patients and residents in the community are interspersed among beautiful and poignant nature writing.

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland - Pan Macmillan

That’s one of the reasons there are so few takers. When Hodges got his first salaried GP job there were 50 applicants. Today, all the local GPs I speak to insist that you could pretty much walk into any practice in the county and be hired on the spot. Not surprisingly, young doctors often prefer a few days a week as a contracted locum without the pressure of also being responsible – as here – for the management and livelihoods of 140 staff. The result is a kind of perfect storm of stress on the traditional partnership model – a recent Royal College of General Practitioners survey found that 42% of GPs in England were “likely or very likely to leave the profession in the next five years”, with nearly half of those suggesting burnout or stress as the prime reason. This will have an impact on all of us at some point. But without more widespread recognition of the problem, we might not even notice what we are missing out on. A longitudinal study of continuity of primary care in England published in 2021 showed that not only were fewer patients able to see their preferred GP, but fewer even had a preferred GP in the first place. We have, it seems, forgotten to expect, or even to want, a doctor who knows our stories. That experience of a doctor-patient relationship that’s more than transactional is slipping from collective memory. And if it’s something you have never known, why on earth would you cherish it, or fight for it? Extraordinarily vivid descriptions of the valley and the seasons… The way descriptions of the landscape are woven into the humanity of the characters depicted is nothing short of magical.It’s the boiling frog analogy,” Hodges says. “The water’s not been comfortable for a decade, but it’s now very noticeably warmer. It will soon reach a threshold where there is a collapse.” So, a very big thank you to Polly Morland and to our unnamed colleague, the wonderful subject of ‘A Fortunate Woman’, for inspiring us this year and giving us hope for next.

Stress, exhaustion and 1,000 patients a day: the life of an

In the snow-bound January of 1947, a new GP arrived in “the valley”. He had served as a navy surgeon in the war, but now he was a country doctor, there to stay. Eighteen months later, each of his patients received a terse letter: “You are now part of the National Health Service, so you don’t need to pay me any more, thank you very much.” He remained for 35 years. Christina Patterson, Sunday Times The doctor's kindly, hollistic approach - she makes time to investigate her patients' social as well as physical needs - seems to evoke a lost world . . . Morland's book contains a profound message for the future at a critical moment for general practice and us all. This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape – “the valley” itself is a defining feature of people’s lives. It explores the choices the doctor made in her young life, and the difficulties, decisions, risk assessments, ethical questions and occasional spells of anguish that make up a GP’s normal day, as well as the jokes, tea and levity. There are farmers so stoical they can go on calving for ten days despite a broken femur, babies with earache, transgender teenagers, bewildered elders, blood and, eventually, Covid. All her patients seem to agree their doctor is “a good listener”. I particularly enjoyed listening to the stories which I can relate to. There is a rallying call for the importance of continuity of care and the risk of losing this forever. When I chose general practice as a career it was this emphasis on continuity, families and community that appealed to me.The book maps on to Berger’s by likewise offering some case histories of the kind that might feature in a TV drama. Here too the doctor drives, walks, cycles to remote cottages, to scenes of sadness and dismay, fear, stoicism and horror accidents. (All cases have been “reimagined and reconfigured” so as to retain patient confidentiality.) There are also the day-to-day, in-person, ten-minute appointments – or there were, before the pandemic. I laughed out loud at several scenes, and wiped away tears at others; this evoked human drama and life’s ebbs and flow in all its complexity, bound up by a love for the wild surroundings of the valley practice, haunted and inspired by the original book (and GP) on which this is based: “A Fortunate Man.”

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland - Pan Macmillan A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland - Pan Macmillan

This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape. A New Statesman Book of the Year 2022Log in to your NB Dashboard and use the 'Add Reflective Note' button at the bottom of a blog entry to add your note. A really terrific book… deeply moving, engrossing and unforgettable… At a very difficult time for general practice and for the medical profession as a whole, this book comes as a most welcome affirmation of the central importance of a respectful, reciprocal relationship between doctors and patients. British Journal of General Practice