Old-style GP on new quest
Last updated 17:34, Thursday, 21 August 2008
HAYDON Bridge GP Steven Ford has had many brushes with danger, along with insults hurled at him by staff, but his popularity with patients is obvious.
At once exasperating, but kind, demanding, but generous, he is a man who nonetheless commands respect from most that he meets.
The warmth and loyalty felt by a legion of patients and his colleagues at Haydon Bridge Health Centre were evident when he retired last week.
A whip round paid for a top-notch bike for him, and their gratitude to a doctor who has crossed hill and dale in all weathers to tend them was writ large in a leather-bound book.
His drive and determination is now taking him down a different track altogether.
For last week he announced he would stand for Parliament at the next elections – in defence of the National Health Service he himself has always served beyond the call of duty.
At the age of 55, he is giving himself a decade to make a difference in the fight against the “creeping privatisation” of the NHS.
He won’t be a single issue candidate, he says though, because the environment and the reform of the stifling party-political system itself are also high on his agenda.
But it is his perception the UK is following the US down the private health insurance route that has goaded him into making a stand.
More than 45 million Americans have no access to medical care, and that is something, as a doctor reared on the principle of free healthcare for all, he simply finds “uncivilised”.
Steven was destined for a career in medicine from a young age.
He well remembers the time his mother decided to re-train as a nurse, for he was 10 and she had to move into the nurses’ home with all the other trainees.
His visits to her on the hospital wards left such an indelible impression that he never really considered any other profession for himself.
He and his wife, Jean, and their two small children – Daisy and Haydn – arrived in Haydon Bridge in a battered old two-tone VW Polo in 1989.
He had spent the years since he qualified, in 1976, in Birmingham, Scarborough and Nottingham.
However, he found what he was really looking for in Haydon Bridge.
“I have spent the past 19 years on call, really. People drop in at my house, too, if they need to see me out of hours,” he said.
“But that’s what it’s all about, being a village doctor – if I hadn’t wanted that type of life I wouldn’t have moved to such a small place.”
As rural a parish as Haydon Bridge is, the times have changed as much there as anywhere else.
With Jean working alongside him as the practice’s computer manager, the couple have helped take Haydon Bridge Health Centre from strength to strength.
Steven’s informal ‘my door’s always open’ policy has helped increase the number of patients on roll from 2,000 to almost 3,500.
And what was once a very old-fashioned practice offering very few services has been transformed into the most modern of health centres.
It now provides all the services you can imagine, from personal welfare checks to minor surgery to organised care for chronic conditions.
Proactive and preventative healthcare measures have also reduced the number of emergency call-outs nowadays, too.
Steven said: “We used to do things differently in the ’80s.
“Sitting with patients whilst they were born, sitting with patients whilst they died, sewing up wounds in the front parlour, hauling drunks out of ditches, putting up drips in public bars, hauling bodies and bits of bodies out of wrecked cars ... it was a different world altogether.
“I have even transported arrested felons to the police station when asked to do so by an officer.”
The memories came rolling back recently when he watched an old video of himself visiting a remote farm in the west Allen Valley.
His trusty old Land Rover chugged through deep snow, on un-made roads, until he could go no further. A tractor towed him the rest of the way.
His very first night on duty in Haydon Bridge, he had to make a 50-mile round trip to see a patient.
“At various times I have crossed fields and forded rivers in darkness, in the rain, on foot.
“I have pushed ambulances out of clarty farm yards; I have had a gun drawn on me (in Nottingham); and I have had a large woodsman’s axe buried deep into a beam next to me.
“It has been fun, in a ‘living on the frontier’ sort of way!”
Much has been made over the years of the fact that Steven is a lone male on a team staffed by 20-plus women.
He says he prefers working with women, and is most at ease in their company – “and they seem to be able to talk to me”.
The joke among them is that it takes his wife Jean to get him out of bed in the morning, and then the rest of them to organise his day.
The frustration some of them have vented over the years, including the member of staff who once called him a “snotbag”, is tempered.
One of his partners, Dr Gail Young, said in a speech at his leaving do: “However, most of our muttered curses have been said with exasperated fondness, as we have all come to know his quirks and foibles.
“But we have forgiven them, because he is, after all, a man.
“More importantly, Steve has been hugely popular with patients – liked and valued as an old-style family doctor, who cared for them and was interested in them as people.
“He has always been willing to go that extra mile for them.”
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