Of all the developments that have affected general practice over my professional lifetime, there is one piece of equipment that stands out for the massive impact that it has had on our lives. It’s not the automated sphygmomanometer. It’s not user-friendly defibrillators, or auto-reporting ECGs. It’s not even the computer – even though its impact has been massive and has certainly affected the way all of us practice. No – in my opinion, the most fundamental change has come as a result of the mobile phone.

Mobile phones come in for their share of stick at the best of times. Few things make me want to drop my facade as a deeply caring gentle human being than the noise of a thoughtless moron yelling into their phone in a public place. But that’s by-the-by. Mobile phones have become so ubiquitous, given away free with ultra-cheap contracts, that we often forget just how modern and life changing they actually are.

And their impact on general practice? Way back in the mists of time when I first started work as a GP, they didn’t exist. For those of you who have never known practice without them, just imagine what that was like. When I was on call – those were the days before out-of-hours services – I had to ensure that there was someone at the end of a phone line who could take messages, and work out a way of contacting me. In my case, that someone was my wife. Barbara was effectively stuck at home for the whole of every weekend on call. At least I could get out to do the visits. She was anchored to the phone line. When a call came in, she either had to decide to save it for me for when

I next got home, or had to work out how to track me down – typically keeping home phone numbers of all the visits I was scheduled to do (there were always a lot) and phoning them to ask if I was still there. I would also find a phone box – remember those? – and call home before I left part of the patch, just in case I might get home and promptly have to go back out again.

And as result of this, almost every GP had to live in their practice area – or very close to it. Indeed for many years, our practice contract insisted on this being the case for all the partners. Unless you had a flat or room available to sleep in the surgery, logic and logistics determined that it was only sense to live in the area where you were on call. Being based miles away just made life complicated, and phone calls expensive. And living on the patch made it inevitable that you became very much part of the community.

The mobile phone changed all that. Wonderfully, it liberated spouses or partners from being tied to home all weekend or in the evenings. This often led to a fundamental change in the relationship between the spouses and the practice. Even as I write those words I recognise just how odd they might seem – but the simple fact is that the person who took the phone calls – whoever that might be – was effectively an essential part of the practice team.

And the simple invention of the mobile phone changed forever the living arrangements and lifestyles of generations of doctors, and frequently - a very major role - their relationships with their communities. There was much less need for them to be based in the area where they lived. As unintended consequences go, these were pretty big ones.