Sorry not posted for a while but those nice idiots at BT who screwed an extra half billion out of the Government to fund the N3 super fast dial up connection seem to have done the same to our local internet service lately. After many phone calls to India we are now sometimes getting 4kbs connection which I am sure given that dial up was 44kbs is good value for money.
However moan over and hoping that this will hit the blogosphere sometime before the next century starts. While attempting to very slowly crawl the web we saw this article in the GP magazine Pulse.
Now to those of us at the coalface this is not exactly news but what is concerning is the numbers involved. What is interesting is the use of non medical “consultants”.
Other bloggers have commented on “consultants” for example “consultant” physiotherapists and “consultant” nurses. This is another example of the current Party’s progress though ignorance initiative. If it is dumb give it a degree out of a cornflake packet or make them a “consultant”. Then allow them to “treat” patients instead of nasty expensive doctors.
In the good old days the word “consultant” was spelt “senior” so a Senior Physiotherapist meant exactly what you got. A senior complimentary therapist not a doctor. Similarly with nurses but a senior nurse was still a nurse not a consultant which implied a doctor with a lot of years of experience in training and several exams passed in order to earn the title of a real consultant.
According to the article 36% of trusts contacted said they did not allow GPs to request that a patient saw a medical specialist (doctor) rather than a specialist nurse or allied health professional. More Party “Choice”? Allow a Party dummkopf manager to decide what medical care is best for you comrade patient all in the name of Prudence? We think it is call "World-Class" Commissioning.
Locally this system is up and running (very badly). We get lots of letters from these “consultants” who if we had done what they do now when we were junior doctors we would have been killed by the real consultants. But still they are “consultant” “practitioners” (failed doctors like the “pratitioner” word a lot).
What is more frightening is that some of these idiots don’t just get to “treat” you they actually read the referral letters and decide what "treatment" you get in the first place. This is particularly a problem with orthopaedics locally and one of the team has quite a lot of experience of how badly patients are mistreated by the local “consultants”.
They have accumulated a lot of cases where something as barn door obvious in a referral letter such as:
“had sudden onset of leg pain followed by weakness in the leg which has persisted and worsened day on day with associated muscle wasting on that side. I think he needs an urgent MRI scan in case there is something surgical that can be offered . . . .”.
Any guesses what the GP is asking for? The letter was sent to an orthopaedic surgeon urgently but no surgeon saw these patients.
The letters were intercepted via Choose and Book and then read by a “consultant” complimentary therapist. What in any First World country would have resulted in an urgent MRI scan in Mr Brown’s dumbed down “consultant” led NHS resulted in several months of painful complimentary therapy as the muscle wasting and pain got worse after each “treatment”.
After several months, the patients finally got their MRI scans (as per the protocol) which showed (guess what?) a prolapsed disc pushing on a nerve causing the pain and muscle wasting. And guess what the “consultants” did then?
They stopped “treating” their patients “it is too dangerous” and referred them several months late to see a consultant orthopaedic surgeon. The real consultant knew straight away what was needed for they, like the patients’ GP, were qualified doctors, not a complimentary therapist, sorry “consultant” complimentary therapist, and did the surgery.
Amazingly the patients then got better. Remember who we referred the patient to first? Remember who sorted the problem out? Remember who got in the way?
Remember too dear reader that a GP can refer direct to a complimentary therapist if they choose to do although the local Politburo prevents direct referral to an orthopaedic surgeon via its organs of “Choose and Book” and the “Referral Management Centre” both organs of a four letter description.
We here at ND Central think it is an excellent idea to let people who are unable to operate, and indeed have never operated, see patients and decide who needs surgery or not. If you are trained as a complimentary therapist the only thing you are good at is complimentary therapy - not surgery. Unfortunately local Commissars don’t see things like that.
The figures in the article are quite frightening with some trusts allowing 50% of GP referrals to be seen by “hospital specialists” and the average 28%. We seem to recall that patients were meant to see consultants in outpatients a while back not “consultants” or junior doctors?
Praise be to the Party for over training doctors but replacing them with “consultants”. Will the next stage NHS review be planning a return to year zero to improve UK healthcare? We know that worked well some where else in the world and with all the cuts being forecast . . . who really needs doctors when the local shaman is so much cheaper?
