Welcome to Despatches

Despatches is a new blog from the Adam Smith Institute featuring insights from a senior NHS doctor who has returned to a hospital, just outside of London, to support the fight against COVID19.

We believe in these difficult times it is important to provide a platform for a wide array of perspectives: to show diversity of thought, opinion, and experience.

Friedrich A. Hayek explains, in The Use of Knowledge in Society, that useful knowledge “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess”. 

In that spirit, we believe this blog will offer an important perspective on what is happening within the UK’s National Health Service. This ‘bottom up’ view will naturally be different from those we normally hear from — those at the top of the system. We to expand understanding of what is happening on the ground. This is one real personal perspective at one particular hospital. The views are those of this doctor, and may not reflect those of the ASI’s staff, fellows or directors.

This doctor is writing under the condition of anonymity. We shall call him Dr Smith.

Matthew Lesh is the Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute