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.
I have this discussion regularly with a family member who is a GP.
They don’t like the idea because of reasons.
They don’t want people to just skip past them and go to the specialist because… Erm… Reasons.
My wife is from Eastern Europe. When we go over there, we go and see specialists easily. Skin problem? Pop to a dermatologist. Easy, quick, effective. I’ve had stuff misdiagnosed by GPs here and corrected by doctors there – because they’re specialists.
GPs still exist there, you go for checkups and if you’re not sure what’s wrong.
And when you want to get something sorted, it gets done. I had a minor issue a while back, GP told me it’s be a day surgery, with several months (at least and this was years and years ago) wait. Went to the specialist over there and they said they could do it. I asked when he could fit me in. He didn’t understand the question and told me to stop messing about and hop on the table. Twenty minutes later I walked out with the problem quickly sorted with a scalpel and a couple of stitches.
A GP told me i could do with a scan. So I toddled off and had it done the next day. Went back and she recommended some medication. I asked my GP relative if it’s available in UK or needs prescription, cos lots of things are OTC there that are regulated more tightly here (more requirements to see a doctor that aren’t necessary). My relative responded that I’d need a scan to see if that was necessary. When I told them I had literally just walked into a hospital and had it done that day, it didn’t compute.
It’s an eye opener going to a country where the health system isn’t shit.
Sure, you have to pay for it, but it’s better to have a paid for system that tries to keep you alive.
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.
Absolutely, a few weeks ago I got an appointment with my private GP within two hours of requesting one. On a Saturday.
It’s a Pavlovian response. Ever since doctors had their mouths stuffed with gold to create the Our NHS their first response is to demand more money whoever the government wants to make any changes.
“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.
Have you been going to my local surgery, Otto?
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..
Socialism does give rise to interesting business models. When I was running my own business, it never dawned on me to go on strike until I could make it harder for clients to see me. Most of my time was spent making it very easy for clients to contact me. I suppose because I needed the money…
Local restaurant – “Yesterday was great, we were really busy”
Local NHS GP – “Yesterday was awful, we were really busy”