Non - General Practice/NHS Is In Crisis

OHP, the largest GP practice has 370,000 patients with 189 GP partners, in and around the West Midlands.

Due to the lack of GPs, they have started recruiting and using Physician Associates (an American idea - there's a surprise!) to help with diagnosis.

(Physician associates are trained to perform a number of roles, including taking medical histories, performing examinations, diagnosing illnesses, analysing test results and developing management plans for the care of patients.

It is a very slippery slope.

The Yanks are coming to take over. The end of the NHS is in sight.
 
The standards at my GP (been with them since 1964) have dropped to a worrying low quality. Since my near fatal bout of Sepsis in January I've needed a lot of help. Once they refused me a phone appointment even though the pain was driving me towards suicidal thoughts. On another occasion I was shouted at by the duty doctor for trying to get a face to face to help my Wife and I deal with the terrible symptoms. Seems to be take these antibiotics and go away now. Don't feel as if I matter any more.
 
wingsnwheels said:
The standards at my GP (been with them since 1964) have dropped to a worrying low quality. Since my near fatal bout of Sepsis in January I've needed a lot of help. Once they refused me a phone appointment even though the pain was driving me towards suicidal thoughts. On another occasion I was shouted at by the duty doctor for trying to get a face to face to help my Wife and I deal with the terrible symptoms. Seems to be take these antibiotics and go away now. Don't feel as if I matter any more.
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Sorry to hear of your experiences......I'm in West Dorset and can assure you it's no better here..:cautious:
 
Called Physicians assistant here in pa and is the step below a Dr and they are becoming more popular because not enough people are going to med school. Med school 10 years or PA school 4-5 years. Obviously a dr earns quite a bit more and in my area a just qualified dr is starting at 200+ k a pa is over 100k and most hospitals wipe most debt off Dr as an incentive
 
Sister in law works in the NHS dealing with staffing levels, basically fire fighting the staffing shortages.

Currently Hampshire are short of 500 (five hundred) mental health nurses.

Even ten year olds are having to wait up to two years to get treated.



This is bonkers and tragic, and as far as I'm concerned the blame lies fairly and squarely at the door of number 10.

Closer to home, I'm currently being referred by my GP to two different consultants.

One was 6 weeks ago, the other just after Christmas.
I've heard nothing, so I'm not even on a waiting list.

The NHS is, through no fault of its own, broken; probably beyond repair.
 
My local practice has dropped to level below shocking. Impossible to get an appointment to physically see a doctor. Many still working from home. All enquiries to see a a GP have to be made through an app which are then screened to decide importance. Average time to see a GP is 5 weeks. Phoning the surgery generally means an hour in a queue before being answered by a receptionist who thinks they are a doctor and ask intrusive questions before making an appointment. Again a face to face appointment is generally 5 weeks or a phone consultation within 7 days. All this has done has encouraged more people to go to A&E to see a doctor leading to waiting times of up to 6 hours if you're lucky. All through the pandemic GP's were impossible to see yet hospital staff of all levels were working incredibly long hours. GP's are a joke, surgeries are understaffed and over subscribed as local areas increase in population with increasing numbers of new properties being built. Can't see it ever improving unless you choose to go private. Perhaps thats the plan.
 
Red_till_im_ded said:
My local practice has dropped to level below shocking. Impossible to get an appointment to physically see a doctor. Many still working from home. All enquiries to see a a GP have to be made through an app which are then screened to decide importance. Average time to see a GP is 5 weeks. Phoning the surgery generally means an hour in a queue before being answered by a receptionist who thinks they are a doctor and ask intrusive questions before making an appointment. Again a face to face appointment is generally 5 weeks or a phone consultation within 7 days. All this has done has encouraged more people to go to A&E to see a doctor leading to waiting times of up to 6 hours if you're lucky. All through the pandemic GP's were impossible to see yet hospital staff of all levels were working incredibly long hours. GP's are a joke, surgeries are understaffed and over subscribed as local areas increase in population with increasing numbers of new properties being built. Can't see it ever improving unless you choose to go private. Perhaps thats the plan.
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That sounds appalling.

I'm lucky, my local practice in Corfe is still functioning well.

I can phone at 8 am for a telephone appointment and will get the doctor call back within the hour.
Face to face can be done to same day as well, but they are reticent to let you do it; but if you've got a boil on your bum or similar that isn't practical by phone, they will give you an appointment.

Staff and Drs are nothing short of brilliant.

But the moment you try for anything further up the food chain, stuff just grinds to a halt.
 
Phoned, come in a get checked, examined, blood tests, hospital, MRI scan ( on a Sunday morning ) consultant, examined, sorted.
All within three weeks during Covid...........................if I was paying private I could not have had better/ quicker treatment.
Hats off to the staff in this case, however I do understand the frustration when it doesn't go smoothly.
 
wingsnwheels said:
The standards at my GP (been with them since 1964) have dropped to a worrying low quality. Since my near fatal bout of Sepsis in January I've needed a lot of help. Once they refused me a phone appointment even though the pain was driving me towards suicidal thoughts. On another occasion I was shouted at by the duty doctor for trying to get a face to face to help my Wife and I deal with the terrible symptoms. Seems to be take these antibiotics and go away now. Don't feel as if I matter any more.
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That's awful Wings'...it's similar here and most of our old reliable GPs have retired or gone 'extremely' part-time...my wife has gone private on a couple of occasions ... for dentist as well...but that's eaten up quite a bit of savings...so we are concerned for our ability to cope with things as time goes on if it gets worse.. anyway Good Luck with everything and 'chin up' as much as you can ...because you certainly both DO matter !
 
I've actually found the practice I belong to really good. Recently I had to have a phone consultation first but two weeks later when I was no better, I got my face to face appointment. I have generally found over the years the doctors have a patient-centred approach, and I've had no complaints.

I guess it varies from practice to practice..
 
There is an answer. Don't get old and don't get ill. My wife has been grossly let down by our GP practice. She has had to resort to her own research of her symptoms and then paying for initial consultations with specialists who then write to our GP telling them what they should be doing. Appointments are virtually impossible to obtain and the receptionists clearly have a mandate to keep people away even though they are not trained to even begin to recognise life threatening conditions. This is Exeter in 2022. Might as well be Whitechapel in 1899.
 
Same here in NZ.

The kick on consequences of Covid will be here for many years.

Printing money to 'pay' people to stay at home, overworked medical staff, many whom have quit. Supply chain backlogs, and a Russian invasion. Hyper inflation, food shortages, rising interest rates, the list is almost endless.

The perfect storm of instability everywhere.

We've all been told things are 'back to normal' but the reality is that this is nothing like the 'normal' we once knew.

Quite a depressing outlook, a bit like a global snow globe that has been shaken to shyte, and will take some time to settle.

I can't see the normal we were used to returning, but hoping it will.
 
I will put my head above the parapet, I'm a GP Practice Manager and have been for just over 10 years, COVID has shown a lot of GP Practices how they can now deliver a service using telephone triage and remote video options.

I started at my new practice this time last year, changed the appointments system to include more face to face appointments with telephone triage as the first contact. Our patients (in Govan) have embraced the changes and whilst they get annoyed sometimes, generally understand the new way of working. General Practice will never go back to the pre-COVID way of working.
 
Good luck trying to see one of them is all I'll say. Once you do get that referral onwards, I found it business as usual in the NHS as ever it has been. Just seems to be GPs that are a bottleneck and more difficult than ever to deal with.

Les_Mahagow said:
I will put my head above the parapet, I'm a GP Practice Manager and have been for just over 10 years, COVID has shown a lot of GP Practices how they can now deliver a service using telephone triage and remote video options.

I started at my new practice this time last year, changed the appointments system to include more face to face appointments with telephone triage as the first contact. Our patients (in Govan) have embraced the changes and whilst they get annoyed sometimes, generally understand the new way of working. General Practice will never go back to the pre-COVID way of working.
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Thanks, it is interesting to hear that perspective and that it is intentional. If that could be communicated to the public more formally so that we understand, that would prevent a lot of frustration I think.
 
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