Making Doctors Think Twice

Experience taught Sue Wylie there are better ways for doctors to deliver devastating news to patients. Now she’s showing them how with her new film...

- Carole Richardson

All alone, actress Sue Wylie walked into a hospital consultant’s office expecting to be told she had a trapped nerve after noticing her left hand hadn’t been moving properly when typing.

A few basic tests later, she learnt otherwise when he bluntly told her: “This will come as a shock, but you’ve got Parkinson’s.”

The consultant was right on both counts. His initial diagnosis was correct and it did come as a complete shock to Sue, who’d just celebrated her 50th birthday. Not least because of the way the news was so coldly delivered. “It was my first appointment and I was just not expecting it. I hadn’t even asked anyone to come with me,” recalls Sue, who has worked in radio, theatre and TV under her stage name Sue Broomfield, appearing in The Bill, Love Hurts and The Two of Us.

“There was no preamble, he just did a few straightforward tests – like asking me to clench and release my hands and touch my nose – and then he came out with it as coldly as that. He even said he’d diagnosed me based on my notes before I even walked through the door.

“Then when I received a letter confirming my diagnosis, it wasn’t even written to me. It was just a copy of one sent to my GP. It feels like you’re being excluded from your own experience. There are much better, more personal ways of delivering bad news.”