‘We recently refurbished a few rooms and I was asked if I wanted to move and I basically just couldn’t let go.’Įveryone, in fact, is still working through what happened, including Dr Torry. For years, she treasured Dr Tebboth’s oximeter, her books, a poem on the wall about migrants – and has a strong sense of continuing her legacy. ‘People since then have asked us: “What was HR doing and what about your senior line management?” I don’t think they quite understood.’ She and other partners went back to the practice immediately after the funeral.ĭr Nagpal still works in ‘Louise’s room’. How could they let us go to work? The processes and rules come above everything else, compassion and humanity.’ĭr Torry knows people were hurt, acknowledges it was a ‘mess’. ‘I thought the partners had done their best and any anger I had was towards the system, NHS England, the bureaucracy. As Dr Nagpal puts it: ‘All of us felt like somebody else’s right to grief was greater than our own.’ĭr Dove does not hide her anger. Some felt they needed to defer to others’ feelings. One of the hardest things to manage was the day of the funeral.Īll three GPs are frustrated with ‘the system’ that the practice had to stay open, albeit with a minimal service, which meant not everyone could attend the memorial. NAGPAL: 'How did I not know she had this going on?’ ‘I remember talking to patients, some with really trivial things, which seemed a thousand times more trivial because all I was thinking was, “my friend has just died”. ‘Walking over that threshold was a really hard thing to do: all her things were still in that room and no one at that point felt they had the mental strength to remove them.’ĭr Dove found the first few morning surgeries gruelling. She held her surgery sitting in Dr Tebboth’s chair. Between them, they rang the rest of the practice team and informed the clinical commissioning group on the Monday, they held meetings with staff.ĭr Nagpal’s first day back at work was the Tuesday. Breaking the news to the other four partners, she sensed ‘the almost physical blow they experienced’. TEBBOTH: Mentor and committed to social justiceĭr Tebboth had been on sick leave for several months and had only recently confided in a few colleagues that she was struggling with depression.ĭr Torry, the senior partner, took the call from Louise’s husband, Gary, early one Saturday morning. They’d even been to the same school.įive years on, they are still processing their grief, their hurt, their anger. ‘We’d taken some cheap reading glasses and I’ll always remember Louise’s pleasure in helping people try them on.’Īnd Dr Nagpal, who joined the practice in 2012 as a GP registrar, found in Dr Tebboth not only a mentor but also someone who shared her commitment to social justice and the most vulnerable. She had been at Dr Tebboth’s wedding and had travelled with her to Central Asia to visit a former colleague working in a health clinic near the mountains. ‘She was always the first in, often the last to leave… so accommodating, caring and compassionate…’ĭr Torry had been Dr Tebboth’s programme director when she was a registrar. Like the rest of her team, GPs Rebecca Torry, Louisa Dove and Jasmine Nagpal were profoundly shocked.ĭr Dove, who had joined as a newly qualified GP three years earlier, had been making arrangements to meet up for a drink with Dr Tebboth the week before she died. Louise Tebboth had been at her Bermondsey practice for 12 years when she died by suicide in January 2015. What happens next is the subject of a new report which offers a framework to guide practices through such a ‘major incident’, and calls for support – and just a little more compassion. The practice team is thrust into an emergency without a plan, let alone support, forced to improvise, bury their own grief and carry on regardless. But out there is a busy surgery, patients with needs, patients with questions. Inside, the shock, a maelstrom of raw emotion.
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