If GPs disaffiliate from the NHS, how about forming CHARITIES, to thwart Theresa May?
Dr Kailash Chand said the view that GPs only work nine-to-five is nonsense [Image: David Sillitoe for the Guardian].
It will bring the NHS in that country significantly closer to closure and the introduction of an expensive private service for rich people only.
(Yes, you’ll be able to buy insurance – probably from Unum. Just trying getting them to pay out when you need it!)
Call me an old stick-in-the-mud if you want, but I am ideologically opposed to giving selfish tyrants, like Mad Mrs May, what they want.
So, if doctors feel they cannot remain in Mrs May’s NHS, how about forming charities, to continue providing free healthcare in spite of her?
If you are a doctor, you might want to start considering how this could be set up now – the legal aspects and the funding streams that would need to be set up.
This crisis is all about pretending that British doctors, surgeons and medical staff cannot cope because they are lazy or bad at their jobs – and This Writer will not accept such nonsense.
If Mrs May sees that she won’t have her way – no matter how stupidly she acts – she might eventually give up.
I’m not saying forming charity health organisations is the perfect solution – just that people of good conscience need to think about defeating the Tory strategy. Perhaps someone working within the English NHS has a better idea.
In any case, a future Labour government will restore the publicly-funded health service to the proper standard, so any emergency measures need not be expected to be permanent.
Theresa and her Tories must be defeated here. Much more depends on it than simply the NHS in England (and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, whose funding is dependent on the English service receiving cash).
Let’s have a contingency plan ready, for the moment the worst prime minister in UK history does the worst thing she possibly can. Because I think she will.
Family doctors and medical leaders have rejected Theresa May’s demand to move to a seven-day week, with one prominent GP warning that it could lead to mass resignations.
Dr Kailash Chand, a former deputy chair of the British Medical Association, said GPs were so angry with government attempts to scapegoat them for the crisis in the NHS and chronic underfunding that they could disaffiliate from the service.
Downing Street told surgeries in England on Friday that if they refused to move to 8am-8pm opening, seven days a week, they would lose funding unless they could prove there was no demand from patients.
Chand said: “I think making this particular statement at this minute is essentially scapegoating. [May] has got to find something, she can’t blame [the health secretary] Jeremy Hunt for this, or her own government.
“She’s got to find a scapegoat and GPs are probably the easiest scapegoat in this way because your rival papers, like the Daily Mail, all the time are giving the public the view that GPs don’t work and GPs are working only nine-to-five, which is nonsense.”
Source: May’s scapegoat attempt could spark mass resignations, says top GP | Society | The Guardian
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Today’s (Jan 14) BMA comment that surgeries never close is wrong. That maybe true in urban areas with half-a-dozen GPs, but in single/double handed rural surgeries they may close to catch up on paper-work, pay home visits or uprdate on current medical knowledge.
My local practice used to be run by a married couple of GPs. When retired, they were replaced by an adjacent service and shortly after joined by a second GP (selected partly by the patients). Soon after the service was rivised to provide basic access M-F except Thursday p.m. i.s. 4 1/2 days per week in a pair of 18th century cottages.
Now with a new surgery brilliantly fought for by our main GP, we have full 5-day acccess plus dire emergency cover (111, and local MIU, though this is under threat from underfunding (‘tempoary’ loss of all beds) and implementation of STP.
Currnetly, my CCG has about 1/3 unfilled vacancies for GPs because they (and nurses) don’t want to work in infrastructure underfunded rural areas.
May has no solution for Hunt’s (and her) idiocy. They all need to go – we need a GE.
Does your local surgery struggle to treat everybody within a reasonable time?
Sounds like we have two prospective urgent cases for the now much improved and vastly funded NHS Mental Health teams …….. unfortunately for Mother T and that idiot Hunt their Mental Health myth was just a smoke screen so they will have to go to the back of the long “Q”. Unfortunately it means we will have to suffer these feckin morons even longer before some one gets rid of them.
I have wondered if it might help some GPs to set up their own version of ‘cottage hospitals’. I have a feeling these could be very well supported by local communities. The fear would be that they could become a dumping ground for elderly people who could more usefully be cared for in other ways. At least this could take some pressure off major hospitals and provide work for some of the Nursing staff so avidly ejected from other hospitals. I would gladly pay a weekly fee to enable such a facility to survive. I havent thought of all the ramifications obviously and a properly funded and staffed NHS is obviously preferable. Mining villages in south Wales before WW2 set s pattern and exmple for the NHS with integrated services.
We are unable to make ANY appointment to see a doctor at our practice! This has been going on for months. If we think we need to see a doctor, then we have to get up early and phone the surgery, listen to a prolonged recorded message and then talk to a nurse who will decide whether we can TALK to a doctor on the phone. I can assure you that if you feel ill, then this is the last thing you feel able to do, first thing in the morning! This scheme was thought up to stop wasted appointments when people don’t turn up and because most of the GPS only work part time!
The “cottage hospital ” model is ideal, because many towns still have their small hospital. Here in Wiltshire we have our Melksham hospital, Devizes, Chippenham, Trowbridge and Westbury hospitals. Most are used for outpatients, except Westbury which is being turned into housing! Easy to open a couple of wards to relieve the general hospital wards. Tory Wiltshire council won’t do this, of course, lackeys of this nasty Tory government!