GPs in England threaten action over online appointment booking plan
Doctors’ union says GPs will be overwhelmed by ‘triage tsunami’ and gives ministers 48 hours to take measuresGPs in England are threatening to take action over government plans to increase patients’ online access to appointments which they say will lead to a “tsunami” of extra demand.
GP is a majority female occupation these days. We have more of them too. We also have a large portion of those female GPs working part time. The supply of GP’ing has fallen even as we spend more on that £250k cost of training a GP.
Which does lead to an interesting question. If the birds now worked full time would we have enough GP’ing going on?
We could even take a leaf from Spud’s work. He once said – in a TUC budget submission no less – that high paid birds are uniquely subject to hte income effect. Raise their tax rate an they’ll work more hours in order to continue to enjoy that life of loooxury.
So, increase the tax rate on GPs – or, in fact the same effect, lower their pay – and watch as GP’ing labour hours increase.
Solved, eh?
Of course, that does rather depend upon Spud having got his economics right….
My local surgery sends any such patients to the ‘walk in’ clinic the other side of town.
I wouldn’t allow myself be treated by my GP anyway, she’s useless.
GPs are the lowest end of medicine. It’s the easy routine stuff. About zero stress and leaves you plenty of time and energy for family.
Which is a constant pattern with stuff women do. But it also means they don’t grow in experience, don’t innovate to do it better and faster. The whole reason that medicine drags behind every other form of work is how many women are in it, which is about regulation and funding. We should charge a fuck load of money to people to be doctors OR we change regulation to simply be that anyone can turn up and do an exam and then be a doctor. No years in medical school. If you can learn it from a Kindle book, and can pass the test, you are a doctor. Obviously quite a hard test, probably spanning days. You’d get a glut of doctors. A lot of mediocre, overpaid wankers would have to get another job.
I would bin the whole thing and just have hospitals, walk-in centres. GPs suited the era of travel being expensive, so you needed your Dr Finlays in Tannochbrae. You should go to a hospital and if you have a foot problem, go to a foot person, bum problem, a bum person. Which means you get someone who sees things like your problem every day. Can quickly turn it around. No need for 2-3 appointments. No waiting on “specialists”. Like there are at least half a dozen specialisms with cars. You don’t go to a garage for everything. There’s people who change tyres, windscreens, car audio, do body work. You don’t go via someone to get Autoglass. You just call Autoglass.
Considering the near impossibility of getting an appointment nowadays, unless you are from a favoured group or ethnicity as described on here a while back by a commenter whose overseas born wife works as a surgery receptionist and regularly prioritises her fellow countrymen, a GP going on strike would be akin to a tree falling in a forest.
Why assume that what they say they object to is the real reason? It’s far more likely they just object to being told to treat patients as customers.
Patients aren’t the customers to a GP. The customer is the NHS [pbuh] commissar. GPs are set up to provide the bureaucrats what they want, which is rarely the same as what the public wants.
If patients were customers, as they are in most other countries — i.e. GP doesn’t see them, GP doesn’t get paid / GP makes it too difficult, patient goes to a different GP — then things would be quite different.
Nail on the head there Matt.
Most continental countries, I can walk into a surgery, hand over a few Reichsmarks and be seen. I can go to anywhere that has a XRay or MRI machine and pay to use that. These devices were not in hospitals, but in regular office buildings.
In Austria, they introduced a long time ago a kind of credit card. Hand that over to the receptionist and it books the cost against the insurer.
“Which does lead to an interesting question. If the birds now worked full time would we have enough GP’ing going on?”
Still probably not. It would help. You also need them to not take early retirement. Doctoring used to be more of a vocation thing. You did it into old age (because you can, because it wasn’t like coal mining).
The real problem is that we regulate medicine hard. Think about fixing cars. There’s almost zero regulation. The industry evolved into specialisms. We don’t have highly skilled mechanics at Kwik-Fit. The car radio is a bloke that just does car radios. Or the call centre for Virgin Media. There’s first line, which is people who know nothing about networks. If they can’t do it, it gets passed on to some reasonably good people and if they can’t do it, onto some nerds.
Most of what GPs do does not need someone with 7+ years of qualifications and training. You figure out the top 5 things a GP deals with and you spend 3 months training people in just those things. Someone comes in with strep throat, you follow a flowchart, like the people on Virgin Media. You bounce 90% of those at a really low cost.
Yeah but that is what happens now. Either a land whale nurse or an “assistant” usually does the work.
Off topic, but have you seen Spud’s latest? He’s now giving us Commandments.
He’s Moses, come to save us all.
One of the commandments was to “Open your books” because transparency is important. A friend asked if that would mean that he’d be publishing his own tax returns. That question is currently unpublished, so apparently not..