Last update 02/06/2008
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Support
Your Surgery
– please sign the petition Either drop into
the surgery or log onto www.supportyoursurgery.org.uk
to sign the petition to preserve the future of comprehensive, high
quality patient care in communities across the country. There is an
information display in the surgery – or you can find out more from the
website above.
Quality
of Care and GP Opening Hours – the debate in the media Dear
Patient, Your
GP surgery works hard to ensure that most patients can be seen as soon as
possible, and at times that are convenient.
We understand that many patients have to work and sometimes may struggle
to get an appointment time that fits in with work and other commitments. At
present, we are open from 8.00am – 6.30pm Monday to Friday; care outside these
hours is provided by Thamesdoc. Those
who need emergency appointments can see a doctor as soon as possible and
satisfaction levels with our service is very high. A recent questionnaire
confirmed that 86% of our patients say they are happy with current opening
hours. Although
the Government may present their plans as ‘patient friendly’ or responding
to ‘consumer’ demand, a GP service is not the same as a supermarket or a
bank. We know that for our patients, quality is the most important concern, and
that we will not offer our best service if we are continually undermined by
reforms that do not offer real benefits to patients.
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Write to the local or national press telling
them you are against these changes and why. ·
If you have Internet access, please sign the
national petition to No 10 Downing Street:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Polyclinics ·
Write to your MP and tell them how much
you value your local surgery, do not want to lose the relationship with your
family doctor and do not want to see the breakup of NHS general practice that
this government is planning. Depending
on where you live, his contact details are: East
Hampshire
Hampshire North East Click here for copy of this letter in PDF format Click here for TRUE OR FALSE - facts about your GP service
OUT OF HOURS
PROVISION - FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE? The provision of primary care services has always been about a partnership between the doctor and the patient. Nowhere is this more evident than in out of hours or emergency cover. From the inception of the NHS in l948 GPs were responsible for all the patients on their list 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Most GPs, particularly in rural areas, ran a personal list system - as we still do. There was a reasonable understanding that the doctor you called at 3 o’clock in the morning was also the same doctor who had worked a full day the previous day and would be working a full day the following day. For those who have never had to work in this sort of system it is sometimes a difficult concept to grasp and the hours we worked were almost incomprehensible. Most full time doctors in the Wilson Practice until four years ago were working over 70 hours per week. Inevitably it was sometimes difficult to give of your best when you were so tired. The situation did not improve as time moved on. Medicine advanced, meaning that doctors were able to do more; patients’ medical expectations have therefore quite correctly increased. We have moved to a much more 24/7 society and people have increased expectations of availability of medical advice and access to doctors at any hour of the day or night. This was set against a rapidly changing medical work force. Over 75% of entrants to general practice are now female and many are part time. Whilst this has redressed the previous imbalance of a male dominated profession many of this newer generation of doctors do not want to do on-call - indeed it is not a possibility for them as they have young families to care for at home. All of these factors meant that the situation and system that had worked for 40 years was no longer tenable. The new contract introduced by this Government in 2004 addressed amongst other things this problem. It changed things dramatically and I believe for ever. The Government took out of hours responsibility away from GPs and gave it to the PCTs. They clearly thought that this would be a simple and cheap option to run but unsurprisingly this has not proved to be the case. There is no doubt that the Government and Department of Health undervalued the work that GPs were doing out of hours, and now they wish to backtrack. There has been a lot of bad press and propaganda from the government which has been extremely unhelpful. The new contract may have taken out of hours away from us but it also heaped upon us considerably more bureaucracy and day work. Despite losing out of hours we are still working in excess of 50 hours a week and simply going back to the old system is not an option. The current out of hours service needs to be improved, it needs to be made more local and more responsive and there are certainly ways in which this could be done, perhaps by making better use of local facilities such as community hospitals. It requires Government to work with the profession - sadly not something that they have shown a great willingness to do. Meanwhile the partnership between doctors and patients must continue and it is up to all of us to direct Government to make the correct decisions on our behalf to provide not only a good and safe out of hours services but also a day service that is manned by doctors who have not been up all hours of the previous night or expected to be up for most of the following night. Many people believe that this would have been a much more effective use of increased resources than some of the high profile political initiatives such as Choose and Book which has proved, at least in this area, a complete and expensive irrelevance. Dr Michael Hayward
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