Shop staff should teach bedside manners to clinical staff who ignore patients' feelings, according to the Oxford-educated president of the British Medical Association, writes Victoria Owen.

Sir Christopher Paine last night compared the NHS to a leaking bath and said the hectic pace and constant need to free acute hospital beds caused "serious failures of forethought and common sense at the bedside". The former Oxfordshire Health Authority general manager, who was giving his inaugural speech to the BMA, said patients' needs were often ignored by doctors and nurses.

He reported how a man who had undergone serious pelvic surgery was discharged early in the morning and forced to climb downstairs to a public phone to contact his wife.

Sir Christopher said: "Ward staff seem to know too little of their patients' circumstances and needs these days. "There are perhaps other solutions, through the kind of training that staff now receive in shops and service industries.

"Many of these are rather better at practical consumer relations than some of our own professional staff."

Sir Christopher, a retired oncologist, will serve as the BMA president for a year.

He trained at Merton College, Oxford, and spent much of his clinical career at Oxford's Churchill Hospital, in Headington. He now lives in Somerset.