Watching the TV this evening, I saw that the River Wandle is now one of the most clean and healthy of our inland waterways, a far cry from how it used to be in the 1960s when I last went anywhere near it and the tranquil and verdant scene that the TV news was showing was less than a stone’s throw (sorry, bad use of metaphor) from the riots that had plagued the nearby streets just a week or two beforehand.
The contrasts were almost too great to wrap one’s mind around, both in terms of the images themselves and what lay behind these images. I’m sure that 99.9% of the population will have watched the rioting with the strange mix of anger, sadness and foreboding that I felt but I wonder if, like me, you found many of the images almost surreal. With 24 hour news broadcasting, I am beginning to find reality blurring with the superb but contrived images of video gaming and, to some extent, some of my belief is put on hold as a default setting.
Perhaps that’s because so many images from 9/11 throughout the conflicts in Iraq and Afganistan, right through to the last days of the Gadaffi regime are too troubling to store anywhere near the conscious self and perhaps it’s because, with a remit to report news every second of every day, much of what is transmitted by the broadcasters hovers somewhere between fabrication and veracity. News of Gaddafi’s son tracks across my screen as I write this; Rebel fighters in Libya say that Moammar Gadhafi's son Khamis is finally dead. This is the third time that rebels have claimed that Khamis has been killed....
Is it true this time? Who knows but we are happy to assume that someone else does know and that, if the news comes suitably branded with the logo of a third party which we feel we can trust, we’ll go along with it until proven otherwise. Perhaps for the first time in history, the whole population is prepared to abrogate any sense of individual caution and place our trust in a third party whom we’ve never met, blindly accepting what we’ve been told because the messenger wears the right badge of office
One of the reasons we like or feel comfortable with certain people is quite simply because we trust them. In our world, trust probably means that they’re unlikely t inconvenience or embarrass us but in other parts of the world, misplaced trust could easily lead to arrest or even death and so we find ourselves operating in a sort of matrix; most of what we know is of minor importance on any meaningful scale and most of us are fortunate enough to have no concept of what it is to live each day in a climate of fear. For me, the worst that can happen is that I’ll trust the weather forecast or will reroute my journey to avoid a delay caused by accident or road works. If these prove to be wrong, the cost to me is minimal and so the value of trust exceeds the minimal cost in our society and, as a result, the concept has been significantly devalued. We trust the mechanic whom we may never have met, to put the wheels back on our cars correctly and not to put our lives at risk through complacency or lack of care. We trust the road worker beckoning us through by showing the green side of the lollipop sign not to change his mind mid transit through the road works and we trust our GP to spot the difference between an incipient infarction and a bout of trapped wind. Of course, should any of them fail, we have recourse to litigation which, if incapable of bring a loved one back, could make a substantial difference to the quality of life for those left behind.
In a blame culture, anyone is fair game except ourselves and the concept of financial redress is often enough to restore some order in our skewed lives. If, however, we start to believe that financial damages can make up for an increasingly tattered fabric in our society, we run the risk of losing sight of what really matters. In today’s febrile economic state, retaining our customer base – we’ll call them clients if it makes the profession feel more secure – is of paramount importance because there is not a constant supply of new customers to redress the balance when one or more has been lost. Todays’ marketplace is far more competitive than ever before and while you may, on occasion, wish that Mrs Smith and her Shi Tzu might wander round to Micropoore and Partners and give you a well earned rest, even getting rid of the turkeys, to quote Professor Dennis McCurnin in the 1990s, now comes with a price attached.
The net result is that trust is now an even more important component in our market offering than ever before. Our clients are also consumers and they know that they hold all the cards when it comes to endowing a practice with their business. As quickly as they bring it to us they can take it away and, while we may feel the professional responsibility to treat them fairly even though they can and do behave obnoxiously, they have no compunction in wandering off to favour another practice even half way through a course of treatment. Of course most clients are not like that but things are definitely changing. Pfizer’s new business index tells us that we have around 20% fewer active patients and clients than in 2002 and Onswitch data, from way back in 2005, showed that even then around 25% of our clients were happily using more than one practice.
So, in a world where trust is of growing importance but where it seems to mean different things to different people, who should the profession trust? Events over the past two decades have made it clear that putting our trust in the government of the time has proved to be of very limited value and entrusting anything as precious as our professional ethos to the butterfly nature of consumers is a recipe for disappointment and disaster. Ironically, as the realisation that we will struggle to feed the world’s burgeoning population begins to take shape, the future for large animal veterinary surgeons looks rather more assured. However, ask any ancient Roman poet and they would tell us that we should seek to find a caucus of trust and support from within our own ranks. Somewhere within the profession, we should be able to find that support, the initiative to begin a planning process to maximise our chances of success in this rapidly changing world and the vision to find a different but equally satisfying business model to cope with what a cadre of increasingly demanding pet owners will require of us.
One suspects that Juvenal was right and we will need to find the solution for ourselves.
“Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? “ Who indeed?