Saying goodbye to Dobbo and a number of other words from last week

The idea for this week’s blog was sparked by Kenny Gibson, my Twitter friend and prolific tweeter. He posted an early morning tweet yesterday that noted the words ‘listen’ and ‘silent’ have the same letters. More on that later, but the notion started me thinking about words. I have always had a passion for words and love the buzz from presenting, reading and writing. And it can be surprising how many words you might read, write or speak in a day. For example, yesterday I sent 64 tweets. On average there were 21 words in each tweet. That’s some 1,344 a day or nearly 1,000 in a week. In two years, I would have written as many words as I did for my PhD. However, at 100,000 words my thesis pales into insignificance compared to other works – for example, The Bible has 783,137 words, the complete set of Harry Potter books (7) contains I,084,174 words. In comparison, the NHS Long Term Plan has 50,000 words, and my shortened CV (once 28 pages long) now only has 2,038 words.

Of course, more often than not, it’s not the number of words used, but the way in which words get used that counts. I have often said something in a clumsy way, and as a consequence caused someone else unintended hurt. Which one of us hasn’t sent a late night email, possibly after a glass of wine, and then regretted it as soon as the ‘send’ button has been pressed. Many students, particularly when they are starting out, have a tendency to be repetitive in their writing, possibly thinking the number of words counts more than the quality of the content. And just think what saying ‘I love you’ might mean to another person’s world and life.

Newspaper headlines are another great example of how words can be used to reflect public opinion, make comment or simply to evoke humour. These days, I habitually look at the BBC News online services, where their website posts all the popular UK newspaper front pages. It’s a quick and easy way to get up to speed with what is going on and what the issues of the day ahead might be. The service has only been going since November 1997. Earlier in that same year, Friday 2nd May to be precise, it was the BBC’s Today programme where I first heard the news of Tony Blair’s landslide election. It wasn’t so much that his politics weren’t my politics that concerned me as such, it was the promise to abolish the NHS internal market that filled me with dread.

I had just spent two years working on my PhD which was situated in and around the way GP Fundholders made decisions about purchasing care for their patients. I feared that if there was no provider – purchaser split (the basis of the internal market) I would have no PhD thesis! I needn’t have worried, as one type of internal market was replaced by another, only we now called it ‘commissioning and providing’.

The job of ending the internal market was given to Frank Dobson or ‘Dobbo’, as he was affectionally called by many. This clever, sometimes irascible, but always passionate long-serving MP regrettably died last week. I was genuinely sad to hear the news. He was the most unlikely candidate to become Secretary of State for Health and I think even he was surprised at being given the appointment! He spent just 30 months in the post, but what a difference he made. Regular readers of my weekly blog know I steer clear of political narratives in my writing, so I am not making any party-political points here.

Dobbo was the genuine article when it came to practical politics. He is credited, rightly so in my opinion, for bringing some much-needed stability to the NHS. Some of the things he fought for were not always universally welcomed. For example, he established the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), which these days is called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence although the NICE acronym has stuck. Dobbo established the original NICE in an attempt to reduce inequalities in health care provision, the so called ‘postcode lottery’. There were many who saw its work as being a hindrance and if something (usually drugs) didn’t get its approval, there was often an outcry. The National Institute’s remit today is significantly wider and they have a much more sophisticated and effective public health guidance programme, helping to prevent ill health and promote healthier lifestyles.

Dobbo also increased the funding for the NHS and presided over one of the largest hospital-building programmes in the history of the NHS. Along with Tessa Jowell, he established the very successful Sure Start programme aimed at helping families with childcare, health and education in the first three years of their life. While again the programme has had its critics, earlier this year the Institute for Fiscal Studies published their research into the effectiveness of the Sure Start Centres and concluded that the programme had reduced the number of hospital admissions and saved the NHS several millions of pounds each year. Regrettably, as this article suggests, such benefits may well be lost as local government continues to deal with the impact of fiscal pressure. Perhaps the current Chief Executive of the NHS, Sir Simon Stevens, might find a way of safeguarding this programme from further erosion. In a strange twist of history, Simon was also a special advisor to Dobbo during his tenure in charge of the NHS.

And the last word (almost) goes to one of my young grandsons. Harry, aged 4 years, and 9 months  (going on 18) has a bit of a way with words too. Last Thursday, as we were cutting out and pasting Waffle and George’s castle beds (you will have to watch Cbeebies or buy the Cbeebies magazine if this doesn’t mean anything to you), we simultaneously (in the way that only young children can do) played a word game. I would say a word and he would tell me what it meant. He has a growing vocabulary and he often amazes me with the words he chooses to use. One of the words I asked him to define was ‘obesity’. He thought for a millisecond and then said that is when people are too fat, and if they don’t stop getting fat they die. Next week I’m going to ask him what he thinks ‘listen’ and ‘silent’ have in common – he struggles with both concepts, so it will be interesting to hear what he has to say.

There is another strange twist of history to this tale too. Similarly, on 2nd May 1997, Paulo Freire, the world-renowned, and in my eyes brilliant, Brazilian educator and philosopher died. I’m sure both he and Harry would have got on really well; they like me, both love the creativity of words.