Tweet

Dr Julia Grace Patterson💙

11 Apr, 10 tweets, 2 min read

A story about 23 cans of butter beans.

When I decided to pause my psychiatry training to set up EveryDoctor, I didn’t initially have a team. I didn’t have an income. And the only way we could afford to do it was to first move our family of 4 into a 1 bed flat in London, then...

Save up and renovate a small cottage in rural Ireland. We could afford childcare for our 1+2.5 year old there. We knew no one. And I flew back and forth to London as I tried to build relationships with journalists. I was sent threats by senior establishment figures in...

Medicine. I was warned I’d be struck off. I was trolled to an unbelievable extent. And I had no income. Rumours started that I was starting a ‘cult’. I was told I was looking to ‘profiteer like Richard Branson’. It was really, really hairy trying to convince anyone I wasn’t...

Corrupt. Meanwhile, I’d passed all my exams in psychiatry (and needed to do another 3 years training to become a consultant), but put my career on hold to focus on building EveryDoctor. I had no earnings. I put myself, personally, £50k into debt. At one point, I mistakenly...

Ordered 23 cans of butter beans. And I had to eat those butter beans in inventive ways, because I was going further and further into debt. And why did I stick at it? Why did my team come on-board? Why did we put up with the trolling and the debt and the judgement? Because...

medicine is broken. Doctors aren’t broken, but the system is broken. The system is becoming privatised. The system is woefully underfunded. The system lays the blame of errors at the feet of healthcare professionals when in reality there’s water leaking through the roof of...

some hospitals. There’s IT equipment which doesn’t work. There’s never enough time for a break in a 13 hour shift and that’s not normal, but it’s the norm. It’s bad for everyone. It’s bad for doctors and it’s terrible for patients. And something had to give. Many healthcare...

leaders profit from the bad decisions happening. Or they become co-opted. Or they don’t speak up because they’d like a knighthood one day. I carefully compiled a team of people who will never be co-opted. It’s not in their characters. They do not want knighthoods...

And our only aim, our ONLY aim, is to fix this broken system, speak up, and protect doctors and other NHS staff and patients. And this thing has grown from nothing. From less than nothing, from personal debt, to a thing which we’re very, very proud of. We’re independent...

No one influences our political messaging other than our members. We’re nimble. We’re embedded in our community of 1700 doctor members and we listen. And thanks to you, we’re growing.

I will never forget how this started. And I will never stop fighting for NHS staff + patients.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @JujuliaGrace

Dr Julia Grace Patterson💙

@JujuliaGrace

30 Mar

Throughout the pandemic, EveryDoctor has been secretly fed information from those making decisions, in order to bring truth to the media and politicians.

I still remember the time last summer when we learned that government were modelling case data not to create a zero...

@justinmadders

COVID strategy and prevent deaths, but simply to manage case numbers in order to prevent overwhelming NHS bed capacity.

Basically, they decided there was an ‘acceptable’ number of deaths. I spoke to @justinmadders on a Sunday afternoon about it. Both of us were shocked...

I cannot stress the discrepancy in action between UK politicians. Some have been incredible, caring, thoughtful and active. Others have done nothing. We created a database of the politicians who engaged with us from April- now. We’ve run 20 MP briefings. One day, that data...

Read 4 tweets

Dr Julia Grace Patterson💙

@JujuliaGrace

11 Mar

I feel exposed tweeting this, but I think I’ll do it anyway. I cried tears of anger and exhaustion and heartache last night for Sarah. But I also cried for all women. I was attacked on the street by a man when I was at medical school . My facial injuries meant I...#saraheverand

Had to seek A+E treatment. I was then stalked by the police officer who’d taken my evidence (my passport, bag and keys, which had been stuffed in a nearby bin). I was called daily by this police officer who said he was handling my case. Eventually when he accepted I’d turned....

down his romantic advances, he sent my things to a police station in the outskirts of London, and it took me several weeks to track them down. I had no ID, no phone, no money. I was a new student in London. I had PTSD symptoms from my attack, physical injuries, and shame...

Read 5 tweets

Dr Julia Grace Patterson💙

@JujuliaGrace

24 Feb

@EveryDoctorUK

*IMPORTANT*
These 4 legal cases which @EveryDoctorUK and @GoodLawProject are bringing against the government are VERY expensive. The legal costs, though capped, are huge. And the resource required from our two tiny teams is huge too; we need your backing to employ our teams...

It might seem strange to join an organisation of doctors, or join an organisation of lawyers. But this government is not behaving accountably in the usual ways, and we’re the ones who’re relentlessly working to uncover their law-breaking. No one else is doing this.

I cannot...

Tell you the hours spent, the length of our days, and the huge effort on the part of everyone involved. It is big, daunting work. Please, if you want justice, join as a member to both of our organisations. We need to normalise this. We ALL need to get behind our two teams...

Read 4 tweets

Dr Julia Grace Patterson💙

@JujuliaGrace

20 Feb

Since last Summer, the government have managed lockdowns based on the ability of the NHS to ‘cope’ with a burden of sickness and death. They haven’t tried to eliminate sickness and death. Last summer they instructed many hospitals to create ‘surge capacity’. This is essentially..

Some extra ICU beds. No extra ICU staff (we’re short of those), but extra beds. They like to say that the NHS has ‘coped’ because they incorporate these surge beds in their numbers.

Firstly, the NHS has not coped. We had far more ICU patients than these surge beds could hold...

Secondly we didn’t have enough ICU staff. The staff have done heroic things, but at times there have been 4 patients to every 1 ICU nurse (it should be 1:1).

Thirdly, we shouldn’t be managing a pandemic by judging whether there are enough beds to house the sick and dying...

Read 4 tweets

Dr Julia Grace Patterson💙

@JujuliaGrace

20 Feb

Millions of us, millions, feel outraged by our government’s behaviour. Feel unrepresented. Feel unheard in the media

Parliament is not holding this government to account effectively. Traditional organisations (certainly within medicine) are not doing enough. Our establishment...

...our trade unions, our representative bodies, are failing us. And they’ve been failing us for years. Let me use healthcare as an example.

In the past 5 years, nurse student bursaries have been removed. Healthcare workers on visas pay thousands even to work in the NHS...

...which relies upon them and is 100,000 staff short. There are 6.5 billion in unmet NHS repairs. The pensions are a disaster (some doctors PAYING to work extra shifts due to the crazy taxation). And almost 900 of our colleagues have died on the COVID-19 frontline...

Read 4 tweets

Dr Julia Grace Patterson💙

@JujuliaGrace

15 Feb

@DrMusical

Hello! In case you’re following me but don’t know my ‘story’, here it is!

I’m Julia, I’m a doctor. Qualified in 2010. Started running national political campaigns in 2015 with Dr Georgina Wood (@DrMusical). We campaigned for the NHS, and doctors’ working rights. At the time...

@Jeremy_Hunt

@Jeremy_Hunt was stripping junior doctors of safe working hours. Feels like a lifetime ago now. We didn’t have enough clout or resource to oppose the government successfully. But we caught the campaign bug. We realised we needed better methods to capture energy from medics...

So we started the Facebook group “The Political Mess”, for medical activism, for all UK doctors. We realised that lots of excellent doctors involved in campaigning were burning out because of the sheer energy needed to campaign while...

Read 10 tweets

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!