NHS bosses have sent a letter to GPs to remind them to offer face-to-face appointments where necessary, sparking an angry response from professional bodies...
Oh..?
...who say such comments risk insulting hard-working doctors.
Get with it! Employers send out these sort of communications all the time, reminding employees of their responsibilities, from making sure the office fridge is cleaned to reinforcing the wearing of hard hats on site.
If we all got the arse and started bleating about how we weren't the ones that left that six day old Pot Noodle in there, or ended up in casualty for an afternoon when a brick fell on our heads, we'd never get any work done!
“We know that the vast majority of practices have made significant efforts to remain accessible to patients through the pandemic, and to keep staff and patients safe,” the letter states. But, it adds: “It is important that no practice suggests in their communication that the practice is closed or that the practice is not offering the option of face-to-face appointments.”
Which...quite a lot of practices undoubtedly have done! As their 'customers' (and we all know why that's in inverted commas) will tell you.
My mother needed an appointment, and when I made it for her I was given no choice but a phone appointment. No suggestion whatsoever that there was any other option.
Prof Martin Marshall, the chair of the Royal College of GPs, said ... “Any implication that they have not been doing their job properly is an insult to GPs and their teams who have worked throughout the pandemic, continued delivering the vast majority of patient care in the NHS, and face an incredibly difficult winter ahead.”
Not as difficult a winter as you lazy, work-shy bastards would face if they ever made me Health Minister, chum!
12 comments:
'Any implication that they have not been doing their job properly is an insult to GPs....'
The sample of medical students I knew were an idle, reckless and salacious bunch. Late risers and more interested in nurse physiology, borrowing cash and drinking beer. That enduring image of a hard-working doctor is the everyday myth swallowed along with millions of their useless pill prescriptions. Unless there was absolutely no alternative, I wouldn't want my life or looks in their hands.
Here you are lucky to even speak to a doctor on the phone the receptionists are like guard dogs. As for getting any real answers you can forget it, loads of copy and paste advice but if you ask a question that needs a real answer you can actually hear the panic in the doctors voice. They will do anything or fob you off to anyone in order to avoid actually saying anything that they could be held responsible for. Today rather than refer me to a local hospital which he could have done the telephone doctor told me I needed to go to another hospital 35 miles away. This would have caused me at least 2 visits each return journey costing me £84 in taxi fares So a total of £168. I told him I couldn't afford that and he said "well the friends of the hospital might help but they are not working the to Covid". Needless to say I won't be getting the tests. Not bad when I had a stroke only 5 weeks ago.
Well, you can add the doling out of prescriptions for quack medicines like statins, and prescriptions for over-the-counter drugs so that OAPs can save 36p (I'm an OAP by the way).
I find that my GP is one of the laziest bastards I've ever met.
I have a loved one who had to wait months for a much-needed consultation with the psychiatrist. Naturally, when an appointment was eventually secured it offered a telephone call. I was present. It lasted less than three minutes.
I myself am supposedly under the care of neurologists following serious illness last year. They were pretty useless then, and their idea of 'treatment' now seems to be sending me letters every couple of months making and then cancelling outpatient appointments.
Other Half is asthmatic and was telephoned by the GP practice nurse to conduct the annual asthma check. How this can be done remotely eludes me, but no doubt the relevant box was ticked and funding claimed nonetheless.
The wonders of technology, eh? What's next? Chemotherapy via Twitter?
As I said at my place recently. Do you still think that the NHS should be cheered and clapped? I don't. https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2020/09/11/still-fancy-cheering-the-nhs-more-nhs-failure-and-stupidity/
Pros and cons of government funded healthcare:
Pros - Nobody needs to worry about taking personal responsibility for their own health insurance.
Cons - Everything else.
Stonyground that's a pretty good assessment. The only good thing about the NHS is that nobody goes bankrupt over healthcare fees as is the case in the USA. Everything else about it is crap.
Speaking as someone who likes to recycle and upcycle stuff (I created a whole TV distribution network for the home mostly using stuff rescued from skips) I can testify to the problem with things that are 'free'. Stuff that is ostensibly free often turns out to be crap whether it be a rescued TV or VCR or RF cable or a healthcare system. Just as I've had to put back into a skip stuff that turned out to be useless, so we should throw away the NHS and create something better.
We have a doctor and her husband a surgeon living opposite us, they have been at home for 90% of the lockdown and even now are only doing two days a week, my own surgery was staffed with only two doctors a day from seven for 14,000 patients and they want a rise,
Telephone consultations which is the way they want to go go already have a waiting list, wonderful you might as well shut down many surgeries as they fulfill no purpose anymore.
This should be the moment for root and branch reform of the NHS but again the answer is to throw more money at it, result half empty hospitals large numbers of people dying from non covid illness many more in pain from untreated ailments like hip operations, others in danger off going blind because of failure to be get tested and on and on, with no end in sight to the ever lengthening waiting lists.
Even the option of going private has been removed.
Now applaud....
"Stonyground that's a pretty good assessment. The only good thing about the NHS is that nobody goes bankrupt over healthcare fees as is the case in the USA. Everything else about it is crap."
Why is it always assumed that the only alternative to the NHS is the US healthcare system? What about the other 190 odd countries in the world? How about how they operate things? Its like suggesting that the only alternative to anorexia is morbid obesity. As far as I'm aware no-one in France, Germany, Australia, Spain Canada or Japan is ever bankrupted for healthcare bills, so why bring up the one place they can be?
It obvious to any half intelligent (and intellectually honest) person that an objective assessment of healthcare around the world would suggest that the best systems are ones where the State operates as a social insurer, using its ability to charge 'premiums' via the tax system, but stays largely out of the provision of the healthcare itself. In the same way we don't operate a National Food Service, but use the tax and benefit system to provide those in need with money to buy food provided by private industry, healthcare should be provided by a similar public private mix. We have two examples of all Public and all private (the UK vs the US) and they are the two most dysfunctional healthcare systems on the planet.
Can we have something else that actually works for everyone please, not a binary choice between the two worst examples?
Today I received a text from my GP regarding my annual Assmar assessment. I am to arrange a telephone appointment for this.
The assessment usually includes blood pressure and lung capacity tests. Not quite sure how that's gonna work over the phone.
"That enduring image of a hard-working doctor is the everyday myth..."
It used to be correct! My family doctor growing up was Polish, and worked all the hours he could, never failed to come out to an emergency.
Now, the hardest working doctor I can name is Harold Shipman!
"They will do anything or fob you off to anyone in order to avoid actually saying anything that they could be held responsible for."
And yet we're supposed to think that our NHS is the envy of the world.
"Telephone consultations which is the way they want to go go already have a waiting list..."
I didn't even get a slot for my mum's telephone appointment, just 'we'll call you between 9:00 and 18:00'! Sure, we've all got nothing better to do than hang around all day... :/
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