The push for a return to in-person consultations 1A: Negative experience: access ‘I’m lucky I have a smart telephone and I just press redial. But a lot of elderly people don’t have that. If there’s no one to fight their corner, they will just go under the radar.’ (Daughter of patient; Express, 15 October) 1B: Negative experience: safety ‘He should never have gone to A&E in that condition. It is something that should have been sorted out way before then and, having approached his GP practice on four occasions, not to see him I think is the primary reason that they failed to recognise his condition and treat it […] I wish David had had Covid. If he had had Covid, he would have been treated. That’s the irony. How do you diagnose an ear infection without looking in the ear?’ (Father of patient; The Times, 18 October) 1C: Positive experiences ‘For a significant proportion of patients, the blended model has been welcomed: the mother who sends in photos of her boy’s eczema so he doesn’t need to miss school; the teenager with crippling social anxiety who cries quietly down the phone; the elderly lady with a urine infection who does not want to sit in a waiting room that has become a petri-dish for bugs. We do not hear of these stories in the media.’ (Nishma Manek, GP; The Guardian, 14 October) Policy changes and escalating conflict 2A: The media’s contribution to the policy changes ‘With breathtaking [sic] cynicism, Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid have taken a campaign by the Tory-supporting Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday and turned it into government policy. For months, the newspapers have been demanding that GPs return to seeing more patients face to face. Currently, just under 60% of appointments are in person, compared with 80% before the pandemic, with the rest taking placeon the phone or online. The newspapers decided that this isn’t what the public wants. This week, Mr Javid retreated into his Whitehall office to take aim at medics.’ (Journalist; The Guardian, 14 October) 2B: GP response to May letter ‘Every practice will have different issues, with different levels of capacity and demand. But this letter does not include details of any extra investment or resource for primary care services, and does not acknowledge how exhausted and overstretched the whole workforce is.’ (Graham Jackson, GP and senior clinical adviser at the NHS Confederation; The Times, 15 May) 2C: GP response to October directive ‘After weeks of promising an “emergency package” to rescue general practice, we’re hugely dismayed that while additional funding has been promised the package as a whole offers very little and shows a government completely out of touch with the scale of the crisis on the ground […] GPs and their teams will now be facing the worst winter for decades, and as a result, patients’ care will suffer. Appointments willbe harder to book, waiting times will get longer, more of the profession could leave and GPs will struggle to cope.’ (Richard Vautrey, chair of the British Medical Association’s [BMA’s] GP committee, in BMA press release; The Guardian, 14 October) (Mis)representation and abuse of GPs 3A: Negative representations ‘GPs are on £100 000 plus a year and, yes, they’re busy. But if they didn’t realise people get sick all the time and that they’d be busy — they shouldn’t have gone into medicine. Sajid Javid is right to call them out on this. And doctors have no right to be affronted at being told to do what’s best for their patients. I know there’s a GP shortage so why then are so many of them choosing to go part time? Why make a bad situation worse?’(Journalist; Express, 16 October) 3B: Positive representations (and response to negative representations)‘GPs and our teams have worked our socks off throughout the pandemic, delivering essential care and services when many other parts of the NHS shut […] Yet over the last couple of months, GPs and our teams have been subjected to a torrent of unfair and frequently offensive criticism from certain parts of the UK media and some politicians. It has been the worst I can remember in 30 years as a GP.’ (Martin Marshall, Royal College of General Practitioners chair; Mirror, 14 October) 3C: Abuse‘Abuse has become endemic. Last month, four practice staff in Manchester were hospitalised — one with a skull fracture — from a disgruntled patient. I’ve been screamed and shouted at down the phone on more occasions than I can count. Much of this abuse has been legitimised by some sections of the media with their clickbait anti-GP campaign. Politicians have not been blameless.’ (Ellen Welch, GP and author; The Guardian, 14 October) |