More coffee vicar?

What has happened to our fellow journalists ask the GPs we are now forced to report upon at the weekend’s resistance meeting?

The week before Good Morning Britain reported that a massive 1.67% of A&E attendances were due to the fact that people could not, allegedly, get a GP appointment. Mmmn.

We couldn’t link directly to this item but here is a more reasoned account of the story. There are plenty of other (Daily Mail) rants about what they think the research showed.

Does that mean that a massive 98.33% of A&E attendances were due to the fact that A&E patients had another reason for attending other than they could not get a GP appointment?

This simple fact could explain why the great Westminster Hunt said that the A&E problem was purely down to the idle overpaid GPs’ 2004 contract?

A massive 1.67% of A&E attendances due to patients unable to get a GP appointment. As a junior grunt in training one of the doctors at ND Central recalled a patient at a surgery in the morning ask for an appointment to see a GP and when told they could have one that afternoon they said that was not good enough and left.

Later that afternoon the same doctor who was in the local A&E department saw the same lying patient tell the receptionist when challenged about why their life threatening problem was an emergency said they “had tried” to get an appointment but “couldn’t get one” so “had had to come to A&E” because their problem was “an emergency”. (Not).

Now you would expected in what used to be called Gormless Moron TV the usual idle overpaid underworked bastard GPs story to follow. 

But no there was actually a former head of the Royal College of General Practitioners stating that there is apparently a shortfall of 10,000 GPs in the UK which is one of the most under doctored countries in Europe. 

What is wrong with the British media these past 2 weeks?

A couple of weeks ago one of the team had a sortie down South to meet some friends from across the world from grunt school a couple of hours flying time away. During some idle conversation there was a discussion about A&E and why people attended.

Some unpublished research discussed suggested that most people attend A&E not with an “Accident” nor any genuine “Emergency” but the vast majority attend for a non-medical reason. Can you or the Party guess what the this reason for attendance at any Accident or Emergency department is that is not medical? It was an unexpected one.

Wait for the research if it gets published but it was interesting but admittedly not from the hugely affluent agricultural Northernshire where once again all GPs will be drawing lots to see who gets four whole days of golfing leaving this week.

A scene we are sure will be repeated all over the UK as we are after all only short of 10,000 GPs. The UK only trains about 8000 medical graduates a year so that short fall won’t take long to make up will it? Anyone wonder why you might have to wait to see a GP?

Praise be to the Party for ensuring that if you tell a lie often enough the thick will believe it and that is just the great Jeremy the Hunt the GPs’ best friend. More GPs anyone?