Is the government lying about the number of doctors in the NHS?
[Image: AFP.]
This Writer thinks somebody is lying to us.
Family doctors have been leaving the National Health Service at a rate of more than 400 a month, threatening the government’s pledge to ensure general practitioners can provide the public with a seven-day-a-week operation.
A total of 5,159 GPs departed from the NHS in England between April 2016 and March 2017, according to NHS Digital, which collects health data.
The figures emerged after the Financial Times revealed that recruitment agencies could be paid up to £100m by the NHS to find 5,000 GPs — about half of them from overseas — to fill worsening staffing gaps in England.
But this recruitment drive may not be enough to enable the government hit its target for GPs to provide a seven-day service to the public by 2020.
Source: GPs quit NHS in England at rate of 400 a month | ft.com
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This government is full of proven liars. I have no faith in them providing any form of fully funded service
This Pulse article in 2014 spells out the direction the NHS was heading in, top down management, when Tories promised doctors were put in charge.
Revealed: GPs now in a majority on less than a third of CCG boards
28 March 2014 By Jaimie Kaffash, Helen Mooney
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Exclusive GP representation on CCG boards has substantially decreased since commissioning groups were in shadow form, with GPs now making up the majority of board members at just 29% of CCGs, new figures exclusively obtained by Pulse reveal.
The data, collected by the TUC-funded campaign group False Economy, is the most comprehensive analysis to date of the make-up of fully-fledged CCG boards. It reveals that GPs constitute some 43% of all board members – down from 49% in 2012 – and that the proportion of boards where GPs are in the majority has almost halved over the same period, from 56% to 29%.
Andrew Lansley, the health secretary who introduced the Health and Social Care Act, told GPs the original purpose of the reforms was to ‘give you and your colleagues in general practice the responsibility to shape services’.
But GP leaders have said that these latest figures support the growing feeling that CCGs are ‘more like PCTs, with strong managerial diktats’, at the same time as one of the country’s most senior GP commissioner leaders told Pulse that ‘centralism’ is threatening to ‘destroy’ primary care.
Researchers from False Economy began looking in December at the constitution of all 212 CCG boards, based on information on their websites, which CCGs must display. They recorded whether each board member was a GP, hospital doctor, manager, nurse, lay member, public health doctor or a pharmacist, and also counted members of the voluntary sector, local authorities and Healthwatch.
Where are the doctors leaving the NHS going?
Tory “ambition” for 24/7 GP service is actually part of the problem. One local surgery has been taken over by a health authority as it had no GPs at all. Patients seeking consultations have to ring receptionist who then decides if they should be passed to locum in city 100 miles away, who will then use a phone call to triage the patient to see if an appointment with a locum GP is needed. Small problems, like receptionist screening patients health problems, and a TWO WEEK WAIT for the locum triage, and a further two week wait for an appointment to actually see a GP…….looks like the new service model for the “free at the point of use” NHS. Payment of course will get GP consultation on same day.