Towards hope

LJPC is not so much a journal I would say. It is more like a movement that gives hope by championing and supporting a broad vision for health and care. It lifts our eyes beyond the single picture frame to view a whole gallery. It also provides opportunities to think freely and design systems and models of care that derive from the range of people’s needs and meet them, rather than simply describing and assessing focused aspects. Further, LJPC works with many different people’s views and experiences and, having valued them, comes up with comprehensive solutions; the words on its lips being ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-production’. As Gupta et al. enunciate in this issue: ‘Primary care can have an enhanced effect on the good mental health of the population by collaborating with others within local communities for health’. It is affirming to know that such collaboration also benefits the efficiency and health of those doing the collaborating [1]. The enhanced effects of collaborative working on individual practice reminds us that Governments and leaders of all kinds often devise strategy that does the opposite, exemplifying individual actions that can isolate and demotivate others. As John Donne famously wrote in 1624, ‘No man is an island entire of itself’.2 We are all interconnected, even if dividable, and policy should help to achieve strong, healthy inter-connections between people for the sake of the whole of society. Gupta et al. continue: ‘we hope that this paper will help general practice and more broadly, primary care, to take a strong role in developing this (force for whole-society health), in collaboration with public health, local authorities, healthcare and other organisations’. This aligns the paper to the increasing number of initiatives that enable collaboration, such as that being undertaken by The Health Foundation in its (UK Four Nation) Healthy Lives Strategy.3,4 Strategies are nothing without enactment. It is change that matters, beyond the words. LJPC has an important role to play here in supporting those who are committed to making a real difference in their own backyard. In the case of a GP, that means making a real difference to the person in front of them – one of the main duties and rewards of general practice McCartney highlights in this Issue of LJPC, general practices can fail in their duties when we fail to see patients in their full humanity and complexity and instead simply apply guidelines from medical science: