A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - The Top Ten Bestseller, Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize

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The book maps on to Berger’s by likewise offering some case histories of the kind that might feature in a TV drama. Here too the doctor drives, walks, cycles to remote cottages, to scenes of sadness and dismay, fear, stoicism and horror accidents. (All cases have been “reimagined and reconfigured” so as to retain patient confidentiality.) There are also the day-to-day, in-person, ten-minute appointments – or there were, before the pandemic.

A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - The Top Ten A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - The Top Ten

I particularly enjoyed listening to the stories which I can relate to. There is a rallying call for the importance of continuity of care and the risk of losing this forever. When I chose general practice as a career it was this emphasis on continuity, families and community that appealed to me.The anonymous inspiration of Morland’s book – who becomes a kind of emblematic GP everywoman – is Dr Rowena Christmas. I spoke to her about some of the book’s implications, and her current practice in Monmouthshire. She outlined the weight of medical evidence that supported Morland’s argument. “If you have an ongoing medical problem, you’re better to see the doctor that you’ve been seeing regularly. Studies that show that patients who’ve seen the same GP for a year or longer are 25% less likely to use out-of-hours services or be admitted to hospital in emergency, and have better outcomes in all sorts of ways.” I was consoled and compelled by this book’s steady gaze on healing and caring. The writing is beautiful' - Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater and Ghost Wall Stunning in style and content and I hope it encourages all readers to reflect on the book’s key message – the importance of relationship-based care and the fact that it is under threat. Professor Martin Marshall, Chair, Royal College of General Practitioners

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland, Richard Baker - Waterstones A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland, Richard Baker - Waterstones

A gorgeous gorgeous meditation on primary care, pandemic, and nature ! nothing about this was groundbreaking, but it didn’t need to be — the simplicity was more than enough Christina Patterson, Sunday Times The doctor's kindly, hollistic approach - she makes time to investigate her patients' social as well as physical needs - seems to evoke a lost world . . . Morland's book contains a profound message for the future at a critical moment for general practice and us all. Next is a man who has recently suffered a debilitating stroke, but in a perfunctory external assessment has been declared fit for work, and so will lose his right to universal credit against the advice of the doctor and specialist. He’s not sure where to turn. Another letter is written, and while he is there, the doctor also treats him for dermatitis. If you want to read a book that moves you both at the level of sentence and the quality of language and with the emotional depth of its subject matter, then A Fortunate Woman is definitely the book you should be reading’ - Samanth Subramanian, Baillie Gifford judge I was consoled and compelled by this book’s steady gaze on healing and caring. The writing is beautiful. Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater and Ghost WallThis focus on the whole person, while valuable in all medical disciplines, is bread-and-butter work for GPs. Their role as the keeper of patients’ stories is what most of them love about their job, or what they used to. Because the world has turned, and with it the dynamics of primary care. Few of us attending the doctors’ surgery these days expect to see the same GP twice. We don’t know our doctors like we used to, and they don’t know us, a situation only compounded by Covid and the default to remote consultation. Shared stories have, in many cases, given way to medical transactions. As patient numbers have risen, speed of access to a doctor – any doctor – has become the overriding priority As A Fortunate Woman ends, ‘after the longest of winters, comes spring’ and with her patients vaccinated, a return to face-to-face consulting, new staff and a trainee our Fortunate Woman is beginning to feel hopeful again: ‘She crouches down next to her bike to peer into a hole in the wall where a stone came loose a few weeks ago. Inside, there is now a nest. New life, she thinks.’ If all that sounds despairing, Hodges then opens his doors, as he does every working morning, to offer the everyday hope of consultation. Aspen has moved to 15-minute appointments (from the NHS regular 10), because it accepts “that most people will come with a list and it makes sense to look at everything”. I sit quietly in the corner and, with consent, observe that still sacred confessional between GP and patient. Looking on, it is hard not to see almost every case as a brief essay on the state of the nation.

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland, Richard Baker - Waterstones

Insightful, moving … instructive when so many practices are in crisis. A Times Audiobook of the Year 2022Last week, I went to Gloucester to see a doctor. I was armed with headlines that placed the city and its surrounding county at the sharpest end of the current crisis in general practice. More than 30,000 patients in Gloucestershire had to wait more than a month for a GP appointment in September, a figure that had doubled in a year. Meanwhile, since the pandemic, doctors and nurses and reception staff have been leaving jobs and partnerships in unprecedented numbers. (There is a current shortfall of at least 4,200 GPs across England, with notable gaps in the south-west.) A Fortunate Woman is a compelling, thoughtful and insightful look at the life and work of a country doctor. Funny, moving and not afraid of the dark, it will speak to readers everywhere.

Stress, exhaustion and 1,000 patients a day: the life of an

It was not that she was out of the ordinary’writes Polly Morland near the start of her compelling and beautifully written book A Fortunate Woman, ‘ Put simply, she is a doctor who knows her patients. She is the keeper of their stories, over years and across generations, witness to the infinite variety of their lives. These stories, she says, are what her job is all about. They are what sustain her, even in days as hard as these.’ Do away with the local doctor, her bike and wellies, her familiar car, her listening ear, her “accumulated knowledge” of yourself, your family and circumstances, a doctor you say hello to on the street, who recognises you “as a person, rather than a pathology” – remove her, and our whole heath system collapses too.Timely… compelling…[the] vital perspective of a single frontline clinician… A delicately drawn miniature. Financial Times Polly Morland and Richard Baker have more than done justice to the original John Berger book – and produced a work that stimulates the eye and the mind in equal measure. Alain de Botton The doctor’s compassion and hard work is a constant reminder of her and her family’s dedication to her vocation.