Christmas traditions are changing: will we bring back the festive cheer?

As I finished my shifts on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I asked my junior doctors a seemingly simple question – how many prescriptions of whiskey, beer, or shandy have been written tonight?

My junior doctors were bewildered at this question, and so I thought perhaps our hospital’s WhatsApp group would be a better location for the answer. Unfortunately, I was wrong and the only reply I received was from a junior doctor hesitatingly answering with: “Slightly lost at the question. Are we supposed to prescribe this?” Amused, my curiosity deepened.

The next day, I went to the acute medical unit and my elderly care ward and asked the charge nurses the same question. Both confessed that no prescriptions for alcohol had been written this year, nor last. One suggested the pandemic was the reason for this change, but I was not convinced. So, what could be the reason for the loss of this long holiday tradition?

Comradery and Christmas during the cold winter months.

I came to the UK in 1995 and begun working in the NHS in the summer. When the holiday season came round, the hospital would organise a Christmas lunch for its staff by wards. The first time I went, I remember eating brussels sprouts, broccoli, turkey and the normal Christmas trimmings – all a new experience for me, and one I had no intention of trying again any time soon.

Although the food left my tastebuds craving anything else (readers, please don’t take offence!), the experience built comradery and lifted spirits during the cold winter months. All the ward staff were in our Christmas paper hats, festive ties and earrings, swimming in a sea of Christmas crackers.

When I think about Christmas over the last few years, there is no warm Christmas dinners over which all the staff bond and get to know each other. As the NHS’s financial budget dwindles, keyworkers were lately given a single food voucher to buy themselves a holiday treat and that has gone too. The gifts and cards that used to be passed between staff also disappeared, now replaced with a generic email or message on WhatsApp. A written card and a small gift is a tradition I strive to keep alive in my department, knowing the importance of creating tokens of appreciation for my team.

Between staff shortages (or a changing spectrum of locum staff if you were lucky), increasingly complex patients with poor outcomes, and unrealistic expectations by patients, and their carers, comradery between staff has begun to wane. Even the friendly head of department no longer walks the wards to wish everyone a ‘Merry Christmas’ – maybe he thought it sounded more and more unintentionally sarcastic with each passing year?

So, back to the original sentiment. When I started in the NHS all those years ago, I vividly remember being encouraged to prescribe small glasses of whiskey for those poor patients who were stuck in the dark, dreary corridors of hospital wards with no friends or family to visit. It was our way of giving them an inexpensive ‘cheeky treat’, a way to take the edge off sleepless nights, and if nothing else, something that gave our patients genuine joy. If it cost us so little and gave so much in return, why did we stop?

I am sure the NHS’s financial constraints are a predisposing factor to our vanishing festive cheer, but there must be more to it than that.

We are living in a country where the evolving demographic is challenging the status quo, where holidays are no longer religiously defined, nor do the staff have enough spare time to laboriously hand-write fifty cards to their fellow colleagues. A quick message, a scroll up, a swipe down (or a swipe right for our younger readers), or a double tap is a much more efficient use of our time. Our hospitals, like our society, have become fragmented.

So where do we go from here? As the face of the pandemic changes, and our NHS continues to be a tool for politicisation, perhaps we will see more traditions disappear from our memory. Maybe they will be replaced with something new, more innovative, and more inclusive? Or perhaps, the last prescription for 30mls of Whiskey PO has already been written.

Whatever the future holds, I will continue to handwrite my cards even though the message has changed.

Here at GM Journal we would to hear what other traditions are disappearing that you will miss!

Dr Anil Kumar, Consultant Physician & Geriatrician, Education Lead, County Hospital, Stafford, UK; University Hospitals of North Modlands; Honorary Clinical Lecturer, Keele Medical School

[email protected]

Miss Tanvi Sinha, Final Year Medical Student, Leicester Medical School, UK