The British Medical Association (BMA) says doctors are being subjected to a “wave of abuse” from patients over lack of access to face-to-face appointments.
If you’re paying one of the servants £100k a year don’t you have a right to getting a tad irate if they refuse to do any work?
I think sooner or later it’s going to progress to worse than abuse. I vaguely know a woman who had had breast cancer three times – full chemo, double mastectomy etc. The doctors gave her a 10% chance of survival. Against all the odds, almost miraculously, she got pregnant (in her early forties as well). She started suffering from backache – it got so bad that she couldn’t move. The doctor refused to see her, because of COVID, and refused to talk to her sister who was trying to make a call for her on one occasion because the woman herself was in too much pain to move to the phone. The doctor diagnosed her with ‘older mother aches and pains’.
Eventually, six months on, she collapsed in the street one day and was taken to hospital where they x-rayed her. They saw a shadow, and scanned her – cancer in her spine and lungs. Maybe it would have got her anyway, but the GP made sure of it.
She’s still able to move around – with pain relief – but in a few months to a year she’s going to leave her baby daughter motherless.
Now, imagine if she had a shotgun. Or a kitchen knife. Or a hammer. And she was the type.
It’s getting to be a target rich environment, too. The cops who kicked the old woman to the ground in Melbourne and pepper sprayed her as she lay there crying in pain from the broken hip they’d just given her are big and tough in a gang with all the body armour and guns, but at night they go back alone to their little suburban homes and their families.
Obviously I fervently hope no one finds out who they are and petrol bombs the house at 3am, but would it amaze anyone? And this is only the start.
The parallel frustration with this is the seeming absence of any kind of advance planning for dealing with it. That there was going to be an enormous backlog of people to deal with was possibly the most obvious consequence of the NHS gibbing of anything that wasn’t COVID for the better part of 18 months.
The wife’s GP was the source of the “tidal wave of patients” quote from earlier in the year – his surgery is still only doing working hours Monday-Friday however…
I think GPs are about to replace estate agents and immigration lawyers on the top of the ‘wouldn’t micturate on them if they were on fire’ list.
A shame for the dedicated ones, of course. If anyone knows any?
I subjected my father’s GP to a “wave of abuse”* when he refused to visit my father during his final illness. He got his home visit. I strongly advise waves of abuse.
*I do excel in waves of abuse. Years of practise. This one included threats of personal violence.
Or, from the conspiracy nut pov, the doctors kept quiet when the government talked bollocks about covid, and now they want their bung.
GP contracts are with the NHS, not the patients. GPs don’t have to bother seeing the patients because they get paid by the NHS regardless. I expect there’s a clause about not having to expose themselves to plague and suchlike. If it was possible to stop paying them I think it would have been tried. Surely?
Interested,
“The doctor diagnosed her with ‘older mother aches and pains’.”
I would never go to a GP for diagnosis. GPs see a load of routine crap, often wasteful routine crap every day. There isn’t much they can successfully diagnose. Pharmacists are as good as GPs. I only see GPs to get a referral, or to get some drugs I can’t get myself. If I could buy antibiotics over the counter or turn up to hospital departments on my own, I wouldn’t need to bother with them at all. And we’d save the NHS billions.
If I had something serious and in an emergency, I would go to a walk-in centre or A&E. Because they have more diagnostic equipment, more doctors with particular specialisms around. They won’t hesitate to give you an X-Ray because it’s in the next room.
Entertaining to see the construction workers rioting in Melbourne over the compulsory vaccination push. The union heads have obviously been co-opted by the government as they were on the Premier’s side.
I actually have a decent GP practice who haven’t completely abandoned the sick. I’ve seen a Doctor a couple of times over the past 18 months over what was fairly routine stuff – had to go in wearing a mask, apart from that no problem.
For as long as GPs rely on the gubmint for pay, that’s who they’ll serve: patients are an incidental inconvenience and outside the treatment of a few easily recognised ailments, mostly useless.
Here’s a retired gp I do trust
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WluULhYEw5k
If remote appointments are ok why pay a GP 110K plus on costs when you can have a zoom with an Indian doctor who earns 10k
@BoM4
‘I would never go to a GP for diagnosis.’
Yes, neither would I – as you say, I’d go to A&E. The woman concerned isn’t as robust as you or I.
That said a very good friend of mine – who is a QC and a judge and a very robust indvidual indeed – was diagnosed with cancer by me after he kept going to his GP suffering from inter alia night sweats, lack of energy, and weight loss. He looked fucking grey, but the GP kept fobbing him off with some bullshit or other, essentially on the basis that he was only 42 or something at the time and statistically he didn’t have cancer I assume.
He was referred to a consultant who specialised in allergies at one point, and only eventually got referred for scans by a private consultant GP to whom he went when I said to him, ‘Look, you twat, you absolutely 100% have fucking cancer.’
Turned out it was by then Stage 4 one of the lymphomas.
He was lucky, it was one of the treatable ones, and the chemo sorted it, though the chemo gave him leukaemia which arrived a couple of years later (rare side effect). Again, he survived it but it fucked him up badly for a while and almost certainly none of it would have happened if the GP had sent him for a scan early.
Utter cunts.
That said, again, I have another mate who went to see his GP over something and she took one look at him and said, never mind that, I want you to go for a blood test now, you look to me like there’s something seriously wrong with you. Turned out his thyroid had packed up completely out of nowhere, probably a viral + exercise combo, and he was very near death from heart attack or coma.
Which only goes to prove the original point I suppose.
Many of the GPs have asked for it. But what about the bloody teachers – are they to get off with their misbehaviour? On these issues I side with the proles – they’ve had a raw deal. Boris should hang a few teachers and GPs and then win a snap election. And then fuck off.
@Dearieme
‘Boris should hang a few teachers and GPs’
Why would he want to do that? They’re doing what he wants them to do.
I used to look at the posters in doctor’s surgeries that exhorted the patients not to assault or abuse the staff, and wonder what sort of animal would do such a thing. Now I look at them and wonder what they could be doing to provoke so many people to anger…….
@Jim; that’s exactly what any poster of that type tells you about the service you can expect from that establishment…
I actually had a in person check up with my GP and when I said I still felt fatigue from Covid (hospitalisation not asymptomatic) asked me how much I was going to blame covid for not exercising enough. It’s good to have a doctor that isn’t afraid to be blunt.
Tim / Richard,
When can we get a ‘reply to’ comment feature going on here? Posting out if sequence is just confusing.
*of – still can’t get the hang of typing on this new phone.
Duh, I hadn’t enabled Gboard – much better now. Sorry folks!
There are still some GPs who went into medicine in order to help people and have no objection to being paid for it alongside those who spotted that it was remarkably well-paid compared to other jobs that didn’t involve daily risking your life. One local GP periodically takes leave to work unpaid for several months for a missionary hospital in Nepal (which reflects a lot of credit on his partners as well as his family). When I was young nursing was a vocation, with pay an afterthought just enough to feed and clothe them (their parents were generally expected to house them with hostels for those whose parents lived too far from the hospital). All the nurses I know/knew personally view(ed) it as a vocation.
My objections are to NHS bureaucrats, not the doctors and nurses. You may well ask “who commissioned these posters?”
@wack
Why not pay the Indian doctor 10K to do a preliminary assessment, and only have patients attend the 100K local GP when necessary – should save a fair bit. That’s more or less what NHS 111 is supposed to do, but it got overwhelmed by all the patients who started using it suddenly during lockdowns.