‘Dementia link to sudden low blood pressure and dizziness’
October 13, 2024
Now if you’re going to get sick, please can you try to plan it well in advance, preferably before 5pm, Monday to Friday?
In the modern NHS (which should be renamed care Not Holidays, Saturday or Sundays) getting to see our local GP at a time when it suits us rather than them has become a pipe-dream, like finding a parking space you don’t have to pay for by mobile phone, or bagging a trolley at the supermarket when you haven’t got a pound coin.
A & E departments are in meltdown, swamped with an extra million people a year (compared with three years ago). They can’t see their local doctor since new contracts in 2004 gave them a 45 per cent pay increase and allowed GPs to opt out of working unsocial hours.
Worse, after sitting patiently in a queue in casualty for hours in the evening or weekend, there’s a one in five chance the person who sees you will be a junior doctor with just a few months’ experience.
Many have not been long in the UK, are on short-term contracts, have limited English, and certainly no knowledge of any of your family history.
Many consultants and senior doctors, like GPs, don’t work at night. Millions of us have lost faith in out-of-hours helplines, run by private companies who use nurses instead of doctors, and would rather take pot luck at hospital instead.
The Health Department reckons that 93 per cent of doctor’s surgeries in England are not open when it is convenient for patients – but what have they done about it? Nothing.
The Care Quality Commission says emergency wards can’t cope. The body which represents A & E doctors agrees. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt blames GPs.
But even when you are lucky enough get to see your family doctor, in the over-stretched, reconfigured cost-efficient NHS, it’s a dispiriting experience.
First, they hardly look at you, and stare at their computer screen. They spend your precious few minutes of face-to-face time typing in information and reading stuff online.
When you have blood tests you have to ring up a couple of days later and speak to the over-worked receptionist, who will tell you if the results are normal or not. That’s a medically unqualified secretary who has a line of patients waiting for appointments and prescriptions standing right in front of her.
If you require a follow-up appointment, then you will have to go through the ridiculous procedure of bagging a convenient slot all over again.
Recently, my arthritis medication was altered, and the new drug requires blood tests for three months, but I was told they couldn’t be put in my diary now as the surgery doesn’t work that far in advance!
When I asked for a printout of my last blood tests, I was told I couldn’t obtain them online as so many were done every day. I have been given a password to log in and order repeat prescriptions, but I can’t communicate directly with my doctor online about changing anything. This is half-baked: either you use the internet properly as a service to patients, or not.
A friend was worried that the whites of her eyes looked slightly yellow, which could mean – although she felt ok – she was suffering from a serious liver complaint, or hepatitis.
She waited days for her appointment, and then was disgusted when the GP (whom she’d never seen before) looked up ‘yellow eyes’ on Google in front of her!
Recently, Mike Farrar, head of the NHS Confederation, told a committee of MPs that he thought patients should email their doctors with their symptoms to free up surgery time. Labour MP Valerie Vaz said: ‘I thought medicine was based on observation.’
In fact, wouldn’t doctors’ surgeries run better if we just Googled our own symptoms and sent an email to the GP for a second opinion? (Only joking).
Another sign that patients are regarded as stumbling blocks to efficiency is a controversial policy document on the Conservative Policy Forum website, an organisation chaired by Oliver Letwin and backed by party co-chairman Grant Shapps, which asks party activists to vote on various proposals to make the NHS more ‘efficient’.
To my horror, they ask if it’s a good or bad idea to limit the number of visits we can make to GPs in a year, and whether appointments at weekends and evenings are ‘a luxury the country cannot afford’. Another gem asks whether ‘families should take care of their infirm relatives’.
This website plays an important part in determining the Conservative Party manifesto – so you have been warned.
It’s perfectly plain that the NHS of the future would run so much better without us, the annoying patients who clog up doctors’ surgeries and A & E units.
Family doctors provide a service we pay for – increasingly, it’s one that suits them, rather than their customers.
Source Mail Online