I made an appointment with my GP. An in-person appointment. Then I got a text claiming to have rearranged my telephone appointment.
Hm. It didn't really matter because it turned out to be dominated by his advocating taking statins while I declined the suggestion. But it was still rather underhand, don't you think?
I thought that one of the reasons for devolving budgets and decision-making power down to local GPs was that they would be able to innovate, to bring in better systems. In some cases there are improvements (repeat medication requests, for example) but it's grievously slow. And there's not much point in it unless there is genuine customer choice. A surgery with a wonderful streamlined appointments system is not much use if it's hundreds of miles away. And as we don't want doctors making decisions about IT purchasing - they're needed elsewhere, and are probably rubbish at it - then we need practice managers to do all that sort of stuff. Which costs a lot.
One great problem within the GP system was the blatant discrimination against men in favour of women. Nothing against women who can be great GP’s, however, men tend to be more dedicated throughout their career, women tend to get married and have children so they either leave or work part time. Now the GP system is broken, there is an insufficient number of men to take up the slack and the typical GP only works for an average of 26 hours per week at a greatly inflated salary. The end result is a great shortage of available appointment slots.
I’m in favour of the French system. You pay the GP €25 per visit, you take a signed chit to the local authority who reimburse you €25. If the GP sees no one, they have no pay so it’s in their interest to accept as many appointments as possible in order to get paid. I say, sack all GP’s and offer a new contract that pays them on each patient seen and not just on their books. Sure, we may lose some GP’s but what’s the loss? They’re seeing far fewer patients anyway. Many others would take up the slack and potentially earn even more than they are currently earning whilst satisfying the demand for patients waiting to be seen.
dearieme - I'm expecting a statin push because I was recently asked to take my blood pressure and report the result through a link the GP texted to me. I had to take the blood pressure reading myself but fortunately we have a little gadget to do that.
Sam - our GP has recently taken on a new practice manager and although it is early days we have noticed an improvement, at least in getting the routine stuff sorted in a timely manner. Unfortunately one of the doctors looks after the website and it's amateurish, like something from the early days of the internet.
Marz - I like the sound of the French system because it would handle a number of issues we have in the UK, one of them being the one you point out, the part time GP problem. Yes women may want to get married and have children, but GP training costs a great deal of money.
I've seen some claims that there are GPs who only ever intended to work part time and not only women. Our GP practice certainly has problems filling GP vacancies and also seems to have a problem finding GPs who want to do it full time.
4 comments:
I made an appointment with my GP. An in-person appointment. Then I got a text claiming to have rearranged my telephone appointment.
Hm. It didn't really matter because it turned out to be dominated by his advocating taking statins while I declined the suggestion. But it was still rather underhand, don't you think?
I thought that one of the reasons for devolving budgets and decision-making power down to local GPs was that they would be able to innovate, to bring in better systems. In some cases there are improvements (repeat medication requests, for example) but it's grievously slow. And there's not much point in it unless there is genuine customer choice. A surgery with a wonderful streamlined appointments system is not much use if it's hundreds of miles away. And as we don't want doctors making decisions about IT purchasing - they're needed elsewhere, and are probably rubbish at it - then we need practice managers to do all that sort of stuff. Which costs a lot.
One great problem within the GP system was the blatant discrimination against men in favour of women. Nothing against women who can be great GP’s, however, men tend to be more dedicated throughout their career, women tend to get married and have children so they either leave or work part time. Now the GP system is broken, there is an insufficient number of men to take up the slack and the typical GP only works for an average of 26 hours per week at a greatly inflated salary. The end result is a great shortage of available appointment slots.
I’m in favour of the French system. You pay the GP €25 per visit, you take a signed chit to the local authority who reimburse you €25. If the GP sees no one, they have no pay so it’s in their interest to accept as many appointments as possible in order to get paid. I say, sack all GP’s and offer a new contract that pays them on each patient seen and not just on their books. Sure, we may lose some GP’s but what’s the loss? They’re seeing far fewer patients anyway. Many others would take up the slack and potentially earn even more than they are currently earning whilst satisfying the demand for patients waiting to be seen.
dearieme - I'm expecting a statin push because I was recently asked to take my blood pressure and report the result through a link the GP texted to me. I had to take the blood pressure reading myself but fortunately we have a little gadget to do that.
Sam - our GP has recently taken on a new practice manager and although it is early days we have noticed an improvement, at least in getting the routine stuff sorted in a timely manner. Unfortunately one of the doctors looks after the website and it's amateurish, like something from the early days of the internet.
Marz - I like the sound of the French system because it would handle a number of issues we have in the UK, one of them being the one you point out, the part time GP problem. Yes women may want to get married and have children, but GP training costs a great deal of money.
I've seen some claims that there are GPs who only ever intended to work part time and not only women. Our GP practice certainly has problems filling GP vacancies and also seems to have a problem finding GPs who want to do it full time.
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