It drives many good doctors into early retirement. This onerous five-year hurdle, which includes five-yearly appraisals and 20 “approvals” by colleagues, was a typical bureaucratic over-reaction to the Harold Shipman scandal. No other country has such a tiresome system.ģ. And why do we need a GP referral before we can see a consultant? It’s a waste of a GP’s time. It’s absurd that our personal health data is jealously guarded by the state. Allow private GPs and consultants to access a patient’s NHS records. Scrap it and allow GPs to contact consultants directly as they used to.Ģ. “For every four-hour surgery, I then have to do two hours of paperwork or battle with the useless NHS IT system to make referrals online, an extraordinarily complex process.” This is a whole new byzantine layer of bureaucracy which seems designed to prevent patients getting a hospital appointment. My seven-point planġ. “Get rid of the vast amount of pointless form filling and data collection,” sighs one family doctor. There are a few easy and far more sensible things I can think of which the Government could do to free up GP appointments. Will pharmacists, also in short supply, really want to run the risk of prescribing antibiotics for a UTI which turns out to be shingles? Or even sepsis? Most likely, they will refer patients to a GP, just in case. I did not have a urinary tract infection. Back in the UK, I dashed to a private GP who chided me for not consulting a doctor. A pharmacist agreed with my self-diagnosis and I managed to get a private prescription for antibiotics before the flight. Recently, I was about to go abroad when I developed what I thought was a UTI. What is that queue going to be like when pharmacists assume their new responsibilities? While she was consulting, prescriptions could not be dispensed, which added to the already long delay. There was just one pharmacist who was doing her harried best to deal with the walking wounded after the bank holiday. In my local Boots yesterday, I joined the queue to collect a prescription. “I'm actually speechless,” said one shattered GP when she heard about the Recovery plan. No, the issue is there aren’t enough doctors to take care of us. Getting through and being told to expect a phone consultation with a GP in two weeks’ time, and when the call comes you are always on the loo, is exasperating, but also not really the issue. Hanging on the telephone, being advised by an automated voice that you are now 17th in the queue, is annoying but it’s not the real issue. But the 8am Scramble, which our technocrat PM has identified as the glitch in the system that he has to fix, is merely a symptom of a terminal disease. It’s not Sunak’s fault that the NHS finally collapsed on his watch. You know, I feel a smidgeon of sympathy for the Government. Research, including a study by the National Institute for Health and Care Research last year, has shown that employing more non-GP roles, such as pharmacists, does not ultimately reduce GP workload. It just delays patients getting the right treatment. The doctors I know tell me the Minor Illness plan will make no difference to GPs’ workload. The pharmacist bounces the patients back to the GP because, here’s the thing, pharmacists AREN’T DOCTORS! They aren’t trained to make differential diagnoses, they can’t examine patients. If Rishi Sunak’s plan sounds familiar, it’s because we already have a Minor Illness plan in place where patients are advised by GP receptionists to go to a pharmacy if it’s something the pharmacist can deal with. If you add nearly 10 million immigrants to GP lists, as the UK has over the past 20 years, and you don’t train more doctors to meet their needs then, it’s quite obvious, to normal people like thee and me, that the NHS won’t cope. But highly-paid NHS managers are far too busy coming up with equity, diversity and inclusion strategies to do anything as practical as train more GPs to meet the needs of a growing population. Each GP in England saw an average of 8,534 patients last year. GPs are already cramming in up to 60 patients a day. Oh, and minor ailments will be taken care of by pharmacists.Īs with many such policy gimmicks, this one shows all the signs of being dreamt up by people who have little contact with life as we know it, Jim. Let’s call it the Primary Care Recovery Plan and promise £240 million for new telephone systems to end the ‘8am Scramble’. With this in mind, the Prime Minister tasked the 300 brains in the Treasury who are assigned to the health service to come up with something “eye-catching” that he can announce. After that thrashing at the local elections, the Government is well aware that one of the biggest sources of anger and frustration among voters is the inability to see a GP.
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