Almost any sensible discussion of sustainable development and the NHS will reveal the worrying symptoms of systems agnosia. Reducing waste, traffic, pollution, energy consumption, water use and food miles are all examples of sustainability objectives with obvious connections to health improvement. Almost all clearly function as early interventions in managing population health risk exposure in relation to the root causes of heart disease, cancer, asthma and many other diseases that the NHS is charged with preventing and treating as set out in the NHS Plan.
The management of the NHS could encompass sustainable development, but only if the chronic disease of systems agnosia is adequately diagnosed and managed.
In The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Oliver Sacks (1985) strikingly describes a case of visual agnosia: The otherwise highly talented musician in question, Dr P, had responses which were very curious. His eyes would dart from one thing to another, picking up tiny features, individual featuresa striking brightness, a colour, a shape would arrest his attention and elicit comment but in no case did he get the scene as a whole. He failed to see the whole, seeing only details which he spotted like blips on a radar screenit was precisely thisthat rendered him incapable of judgement. For more ............
