Wednesday 31 August 2016

New ideas, old ideas?


You have to admire those in charge at the BMA for being so in touch with its grassroots membership and for being so in tune with those in charge of the Health Service in their endless quest to support their members for gongs that they have come up with a whizzo wheeze to solve the GP crisis and restrict workload. You can read about the wheeze here and if you want it from the ass’s horse’s mouth the link at the end of the first paragraph after the header GP Workload will take you there to a document called “Safe Working in General Practice”.

So having signed the peace in our time document with the Party to avoid a possible vote on mass resignation and loss of gongs for the BMA leaders, its leadership have agreed to promote Party policy as the means of solving the GP problem which in a nutshell is too much demand and very limited supply.

To avoid opening a second front the document and its authors lists a series of six principles that you can read in the article towards the end and if this was presented by NHS managers your buzzword bingo card would be full by the end of the first paragraph but nonetheless the language is the same as recycled flawed thinking that working smarter and IT will reduce unmet demand.

Now hubs is currently a buzzword but haven’t we had these before? Walk in centres and Darzhole centres all supposed to reduce GP workload and A&E attendances?

They weren’t called hubs then and the BMA document says that these new hubs are “not walk in centres” (pg 5) and on page 6 the hubs would only offer same day urgent appointments which is great as all unmet demand in general practice is for same day urgent appointments rarely if ever for urgent medical conditions that require immediate medical care just patient want. 

The "I want somemit now so give it to me for free it’s my right whatever" principle. 

It does not take long for Party speak to sneak in for where have some of the team heard the phrase Multi-speciality Community Providers (MCPs) and the term hub before?

This appears at the beginning of page 5 but note the fact that the BMA gong hunters have dropped the word “community” which is the C in the MCP initials and they describe it as a “multi-specialty provider”. They are either dyslexic and/or thick and confusing their C’s for S’s or they are glossing over the fact that MCPs are yet another Party vehicle to dump hospital work onto GPs albeit in “hubs” or GPs working together, "at scale" or in Federations of the sizes quoted in the document and all Party approved/determined "options".

So well done chaps and chapesses at the BMA for coming up this pile of recycled guano which will be as much use as the creeping barrage was to the troops on the front lines in World War 1. Lots of bangs and flashes to achieve nothing useful for the boots on the ground. 

One principal, and the most important the seventh, is conspicuous by its absence and that is where is the extra capacity coming from to create these hubs in terms of fully qualified GPs? 

Time for a rousing rendition of the World War One song Over There! to lift morale we thinks on the front line as the BMA solves the problem and this clip shows exclusive footage of the architects of this leaving BMA headquarters in all its modesty and selling it to the troops they have enthused to sing along and their attitude towards their members. 

Praise be to the Party and its bumchums Allies for doing everything to solve a problem other than defining and addressing the actual problem itself. With all these these hubs from Narnia comrades the war will be over by Christmas (once again).