Will GPs be bribed to put you back to work?
Fit note: could GPs be paid to get patients back to work? (Photo: JH Lancy for GP Online)
Doctors could ask for funding from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to ensure patients go back to work quickly, a top NHS England official has suggested, according to GP Online. Is this the next stage in Iain Duncan Smith’s war on the sick?
Addressing the annual conference of the out-of-hours provider body Urgent Health UK, Professor Keith Willett, national director for acute episodes of care, said getting a patient in to see a GP quickly and issued with a return to work certificate could save the government two weeks of benefits payments. Oh really? And what if the patient isn’t better by then?
He said: “So, in the same way as health has given social care the Better Care Fund, and said “come and help us out”, we could, arguably, go to work and pensions and say, ‘Excuse me, we can get them to go back to work seven days quicker. Can we have some of your money to be able to do that?'”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the gentleman seems to be admitting that doctors are signing people off work who don’t need it – and suggesting that the DWP should bribe them into sending people back to work.
Why is he following an Iain Duncan Smith narrative that has not been proved?
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Doctors should most certainly be the professional people to ascertain whether or not a person is fit for work. Unlike many in the DWP doctors are unlikely to stoop to the depths of lying and risking a patient’s health for the sake of money.
It would appear Professor Keith Willett has been got at by someone in government, one wonders who that may be !!!!!!!!!!.
I respectfully suggest he has been offered a space in the trough along with the un-elected ministers running the UK. The mind boggles but I am not that stupid to go along with new venture from the tories.
Whichever way you look that this, it’s dodgy – paying GPs won’t magically create more time for appointments so if they can do it if paid they could do it if they weren’t paid too.
Agree with Ron. At the moment GPs receive salaries from the NHS budget for doing their job. A proposal to pay them from the “welfare” budget, presumably for doing something else, is profoundly worrying.
My son had a stroke at 20 years of age,he was told that if he had been 20 or thirty years older, it would have killed him. He has a gammy leg, a gammy arm, walks with a limp and has ephasia which is brain damage. He works at a car wash coz they stopped his benefits.
I think it will create trust issues between gps and patients, drs are paid for the job of caring for patients who are sick , but drs are tories/ukippers etc too all fallible to peer pressure. should not be allowed. if they say your sick, you’re sick. no bonuses for bullying patient, and most will be people with none life threatening painful degenerating conditions. i already have no trust in my gp after fighting for 7 years to get a scan to prove prolapsed discs which it showed i had along with arthritis. people are being treat very badly as it is by the nhs system and benefits system, especially those aged between 18 and 65. at 45 who is going to hire someone with a degenerate spine condition. not many to much of an insurance risk, so why are they making our lives a living hell of poverty and phsychological torture/depression ect. because they want us dead , no one to pay pensions too , from maggies kids.