Blame is putting off budding surgeons "Politics is destroying British heart surgery." This is the blunt conclusion of Stephen Westaby, retiring after 35 years as an NHS cardiothoracic surgeon, who was for most of his career at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. In his recently published memoir, Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table, Westaby tells of his emergence from "a grimy council estate" in Scunthorpe to become an innovator in the use of mechanical pumping devices for the treatment of intractable heart failure in patients considered too ill to receive a transplant. The Daily Telegraph
No comments:
Post a Comment