Waking up and smelling the coffee - what has happened to the British media this week?

The last few days the GPs we are now forced to report on under GMC censorship for doctors have noted that 2 news organizations have reported that there might just be a problem with the great non-paying British public getting to see their GPs.

In most countries in the world with far better healthcare than that in the UK there might be a small consideration before demanding an urgent same day appointment for Tarquin’s asymptomatic rash of 3 years’ duration that has caused him no problems until someone suggested it might be meningitis. 

So Good Morning Britain (ITV) has reported thus. (Please be aware there are adverts and you may have to wait to see the full report but this is commercial for profit organization not the NHS). 

The next day the BBC have now put this little item up and later that day this piece. 

So to summarize the past few years of Party and press speak.

GPs are idle overpaid bastards say the press and politicians.

All those idle over paid GPs have been doing nothing other than trouser the dosh and ignore patients when in fact they have done more work (number of appointments up 15.7% since 2008), with less funding (10.7% of the NHS budget in 2005-6 compared with 8.4% of the budget in 20011-12) and a workforce decrease of 3% since 2009. In the commercial world this might be classed as a success.

Idle overpaid bastards say the press and politicians.

This is set to get worse because intelligent medical students paying a fortune for qualifications are going to use the free market to choose their career and repay their student loans and are choosing not to train as GPs. They may also want to do what normal people do with their hard earned dosh and buy houses (not practices), start families and have some time to enjoy them so a 9-5 hospital job with the odd night on call suddenly seems very attractive compared with a minimum Party determined day of 08.00 - 18.30 and threat of having to do the same or more 7 days a week (did we forget the extended Brown shifts on top as well?).

From meetings we know of GP training schemes that are struggling to fill places and which are only c 80% full and the reason a little old lady was removed from a list was because a practice could not replace a GP. If large number of GPs are set to retire and you cannot fill enough vacancies to maintain the status quo can anyone guess what might happen? 

Politicians claim an increase in GP numbers but this is just smoke and mirrors as more and more GPs seek to reduce hours. So let us say that there are 10 GPs working full time and we increase the number of GPs by 100% to 20 GPs but then all 20 GPs choose to work half time then the 100% increase in numbers is in fact a 0% increase in GP availability. This is what has happened at ND Central and in many local practices as GPs realize the job sucks when it didn’t used to. 

Increase demand, reduce resources and something has to give.

Anyone still want to be a GP? Anyone in the TriPartite health alliance smelt the coffee yet? The media only just have but after many years of reporting that everything is rosey.

Praise be to the Party for once again blaming those who are not the problem for the problem and in doing so ignoring the problem. It takes 10-11 years to take a first year medical student and train them to be a GP and the number of GPs retiring is set to increase year on year until 2022 while GP training schemes cannot be filled just to maintain the status quo.

You have been warned comrades things can only get worse while the politicians continue to fiddle and ignore the fire. 

 

 

 

 

Extended hours.

So the BBC have broadcast that the pilots for extended hours have been announced even though earlier the health secretary announced their results. The BBC also proclaims that these will ease the pressure on A&E. 

Well you do not have to be a rocket scientist to realize that these will make not a tad of a difference to A&E attendances in the same way that a former Scottish prime minister thought that extending the standard 10.5 hour GP working day would allow all those busy commuting pensioners and toddlers to be seen when they were not busy at nursery or the Darby and Joan club. That worked so well now children didn’t it?

A few observations from the doctors at ND Central are being reported on here. From experience when you have a lot of doctors available surgeries do not always get full and there are sometimes free spaces especially if that coincides with periods of low demand like work shut down periods (when the former PCT was on holiday).

Under such (rare) circumstances someone ringing up with an urgent emergency, all general practice consults are for precisely this, for example an itchy scrot of 6 months duration, then receptionists are able to say: NHS free at the point of need and abuse sir/madam? That will do nicely I can fit you in straight away.

Now the converse also applies for example during school holidays when doctors who do not see much of their families during the politically determined minimum 10.5 hour day plus extended hours might want to spend some time with their children and so there is a shortage of surgery slots.

As a result there are rarely gaps in surgeries and so when the above emergency, extremely urgent MUST be seen NOW that day case rings up and is told we have no spare slots today we can fit you in tomorrow, next week or you can play Blair appointment roulette and see if you get a lucky on the day appointment what does the punter do?

They use NHS Choice and after a torrent of abuse to the receptionist (abuse is always free at the point of care on the NHS) and how they pay their taxes they march off to A&E comfortable in the knowledge that there is no come back for abuse or wasting an Accident and Emergency department’s time for something that is rarely if ever an accident and even less so an emergency. Increasing A&E is a general practice service with x-ray for those who cannot get what they want, when they want it and it is always NOW – regardless of true (medical) need.

Now using the above experience at a surgery level can anyone see a possible way of improving things? Will a few extra appointments for a few extra hours in a few locations with no extra doctors make any difference?

The issue here is the number of doctors that are available and the politicians are ignoring the elephant in the room and the fact that this elephant is getting bigger year on year. However, they conveniently ignore this and try to stretch a very thin film of puncture repair material over an increasingly large puncture hole they have created at the same time that they are increasing the pressure of demand in the tyre they are trying to fix.

Anyone who has been a cyclist will know what will happen under these circumstances. Do any of the politicians who cycle know this or can work out what is wrong?

Praise be to the Party who whenever they do not provide enough always blame the workforce for not working hard enough. There are 2 one day bank holidays in May this year can you guess how many days the politicians won’t be working in May? No wonder you can never see a politician when you are ill.

Care.data oops the Party did it again.

Care.data. It sounds like a fluffy high tech Party cuddle hug by the NHS of its patients (aaah) until you dissect it in a bit of detail. It is nothing more than shameless exploitation and shafting of your average patients’ and their GPs’ and hospitals’ (personal) medical records for private gain.

Now you can read the Party’s propaganda here and you may also have listened to a Radio 4 item recently saying that only a third of people they surveyed had had a leaflet re care.data in January. At ND Central the figure is much, much, much lower but then all those who live up North are thick and will have missed any care.data leaflet as they were busy eating their fish and chips and mushy peas out of it.

Having said that for some reason the number of patients asking to be excluded from Party.shaft.your.care.data.to.the private.sector.com is far greater than those who asked to be excluded from the Party’s Summary Care Record. Perhaps a reflection of the public’s ethos that the NHS is not there for private gain? 

You have to be careful here for if you opt out from care.data it does NOT mean that your personal medical records will be immune from being accessed by over a million NHS Smart card users without your consent. Indeed certain suppliers of NHS GP software on their Party peddled wears advertise the fact that your patient, has given their implied consent to their medical records being uploaded to the Summary Care Record (SCR).

Not that there is any true NHS Choice here as this information is hidden from any patient looking at the standard GP screen, comrades, and the patient will not have been asked about this issue at any point by a politician or an NHS administrator or their GP. 2 out of the later 3 occupations have had plenty of time to do so but have chosen not to do so.

This means that if you opt out from cuddled care.data the Party has another bite at your records via the Summary Care Record which you have to opt out from separately if you choose to do so. If you don’t your data is there for any data miner the Party allows (to pay for) your data to be accessed using a red, amber and green system of how identifiable you are to the purchaser.

Confused?

As someone put it a few years ago, “I have been with this doctors since the NHS began and my family trust you far more than the politicians to keep our records confidential”. But if the Party does not tell anyone they can acquire all your data by stealth that is of course all right?

There have been a few bits of note re the cuddly fluff that is care.data in the news recently.

Certain GPs of principle have quite rightly decided to opt their patients out using the GMC (Party organ) principles of informed patient consent (something the Party does not believe in nor does its organ) which the Party has conveniently and ultimately overruled using the Health and Social Care Act 2011.

By then NHS England, decided that their bully boy (or girl other genders are available if preferred) tactics were a “misunderstanding”. This is akin to the SA/SS going back after kristallnacht and saying please Sir can we have our balls back it was all a terrible isunderstanding . . .

Further the NHS’ elite remedials who have blown billions on an IT system that has not yet put a single Summary Care Record on the moon let alone on a nationally accessible NHS database have said that they are suspending care.data for a few months in order to “build understand” of (its) benefits.

That really shows the level of ability of NHS managers. Come up with an idea, spend billions on its failure and then go back to better understand the millions they have wasted on it most recently.

Bit like saying we will build a plane and put no wings on it and then wonder why it does not fl? But these morons do this every day and get paid more than nurses and some GPs to do so. Think of the scene from Plant of the Apes (1968) where Charlton Heston makes a paper plane and it flies. The person who crushes the paper plane represents the ability of those in charge of NHS IT. Why fly when you can crawl like a slug? Anyone used C&B today?

Praise be to the Party for creating NHS England and care.data a national repository of uselessness for all those in the bottom third of your average Northernshire comprehensive school who would be unemployed if they had to work rather than something else beginning with w and ending in king for a living.

Unbelievably useless but highly paid uselessness with no principles.