I have been inspired by Harry Eyres’s piece on Slow London in the FT over the weekend. So much of working in medicine feels like a sprint. Short and overbooked appointments, busy clinics, multiple bits of administrative work to be ticked, crossed, signed and dated; e-mails and correspondence to deal with, questions from patients and carers and family members; equipment to be checked, replaced… it can feel frenzied.

Yet in medicine, seriously valuable things go missing in the fast pace. A detailed case history can be time-consuming to obtain but can save so much more on the wrong or unnecessary tests or investigations. Waiting to see if a symptom or test result improves may feel like a waste of time or even laziness, but can, in certain cases, be the most diagnositically useful thing to “do”. Allowing recovery from serious illness can sometimes feel frustrating: can nothing else be done? Yet it may be that “building in time” is the purest and most effective way back to a usual lifestyle.

Imagine if we could get rid of all the time-sapping, cash-depleting vogues in the NHS – Choose and Book and the tick boxes of the GP contract, for example – and invest instead in giving doctors and patients a bit more time to have adequate consultations?