Fabulous story from Ian Leslie:
Martin Bromiley is a modest man with an immodest ambition: to change the way medicine is practised in the UK.
I first met him in a Birmingham hotel, at a meeting of the Clinical Human Factors Group, or CHFG. Hospital chief executives, senior surgeons, experienced nurses and influential medical researchers met, debated and mingled. Keynote speakers included the former chief medical officer for England Sir Liam Donaldson. In the corridors and meeting rooms, rising above the NHS jargon and acronyms and low-level grumbling about government reforms, there floated a tangible sense of purpose and optimism. This was a meeting of believers.
A slow transformation in the way health care works is finally gaining traction. So far, it has gone largely unnoticed by the media or the public because it hasn’t been the result of government edict or executive order. But as Suren Arul, a consultant paediatric surgeon at Birmingham Children’s Hospital put it to me: “We are undergoing a quiet revolution and Martin Bromiley will, one day, be recognised as the man who showed us the way.”
Although I knew whom to look for, Bromiley was hard to spot at first. He wasn’t on stage, and he didn’t address the full conference. He was, I discovered, sitting at a table at the edge of the hall, in the suburbs of the meeting. You would hardly have guessed that the CHFG was a group he’d founded, or that everyone at the meeting that day was there because of him. Bromiley doesn’t fit with our preconceived ideas of a natural leader. He speaks with a soft voice. He doesn’t command your attention, though you find yourself giving it.
Neither is he a doctor, or a health professional of any kind. Bromiley is an airline pilot. He is also a family man, with a terrible story to tell.
This is a splendid read full of smart ideas and great stories.
New Statesman | How mistakes can save lives: one man’s mission to revolutionise the NHS.
