Late Love: Sometimes Doctors Need Saving as Much as Their Patients

'Most of the time I have no idea what to do with them or what to say in response to them.' Award-winning New Zealand poet Glenn Colquhoun is also a doctor who works with struggling young people at the margins, painfully aware of the limits of his role. In this BWB Text he offers penetrating insight into the little he feels he is able to achieve as a GP and youth worker. It is, he says, a song of redemption.'Doctors are pompous. It is one of our strengths. But when I listen to a patient for any length of time I am reduced. They seem much more expert in their lives than I - and any desire for me to be glib shrinks away.'Colquhoun's account builds to radical proposals for New Zealand's primary health care, designed to reconnect our health system with the more vulnerable and less resourced parts of our society.