The Surgery's Gone Down the Plughole

I'm surprised that you have to wait a week for a telephone consultation durhamjen We can always speak to one the same day and, if he thinks it's serious, we will be squeezed in among the appointments. (DH and I once spent half an hour hidden in a treatment room so as not to annoy the people who were already waiting!)

www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/05/gp-surgery-closures-london-crisis-refugee-patients

For those Londoners who do not read the Guardian.

They do indeed need tobe concerned.

Figures out today say that only 80% of places on GP courses have been filled. The government should be worried that they have made the idea of becoming a GP so unattractive despite the salaries.

Yes, Jess. The difference is £30 billion, but they are kindly giving back £8 billion, providing the NHS makes £22 billion in efficiency savings. So the £8 billion is not even guaranteed. But, as you say, they are still big figures.

Just been reading Pulse.
This is why it's difficult to see a GP.

www.pulsetoday.co.uk/your-practice/battling-burnout/it-was-like-leaving-an-abusive-relationship/20010167.article

The comments show he's not the only one.
Also just read that Scotland is going towards fully salaried GPs again. I wonder how that will work out.
Who pays locums, as many in England appear to prefer locum status?

Really durhamjen re the 22 bn? Wow. Either way it is a huge amount and cannot be achieved without significant staff and service cuts.

What I object to is that often you cannot get to see your GP face to face until you have had a telephone consultation a week later. That puts the face to face consultation that your GP has said you need even further back. In the meantime, you need a repeat prescription and your prescription says you cannot have any more tablets until you have seen your GP! I have thought a couple of times that I cannot be bothered with all this and wondered what would happen if I just stopped taking the tablets.

I am to have a telephone consultation with my doctor on Tuesday afternoon. I didn't object, because I want to discuss the letter a consultant has sent to him and copied to me. There is a test that he has to order but doesn't have to see me for that.

Blimey, that's taken me back a good few years, jingl! My granddad used to refer to all medicines as 'jollop'.

Hope you feel better soon

We must be very lucky here with our surgery. I rang at 10ish yesterday morning and asked to see my doctor. There were no appointments but he tacked me on the end of his list. Was seen at 12.

Mind you, the jollop he gave me is doing fuck-all, but that's another story.

"NHS regulators are to push through major changes to how hospitals and GP services are run in whole parts of England where services have been beset by major problems for years.

The unprecedented move will see three key national NHS bodies intervene to dictate how all local services tackle longstanding problems such as understaffing, financial trouble and poor care.

The new “success regime” will be applied first to three areas of England – Essex, North Cumbria and North, East and West Devon – where previous efforts have failed to produce improvements."

From a Guardian article. Does that mean that the 2012 NHS system has been found not to work, because doctors do not want to be accountants?
I notice they have also stopped the NICE review on nursing levels, which Francis recommended after the Mid Staffs report, and scrapped two waiting time targets.

Eloethan over 20,000 operations cancelled in the first three months of this year, and your mum hasn't even got that far yet.
Essex sounds like it's in real trouble, with the trust being taken over.

Isn't it more than that,JessM?
The £8 billion has already been taken off the £30 billion black hole to leave £22 billion.

Claims to be a "social enterprise" but wonder how much the board members get paid... I'm afraid the Coalition opened the door for this kind of outsourcing without it being included in any manifesto and after promises of no manjor NHS reorganisations. The days when people can expect to have a "family doctor" are fast disappearing. Turn up and see a locum will be more the thing.
NHS England is due for £14 billion cuts in the very near future. That is £22 billion so called "efficiency savings" minus the £8billion that the PM kindly promised to give the NHS.
And people voted for this.
Predict that GN, in 3-4 years time, will be swamped with stories about poor care and disappeared services.
We can expect more staff to leave and go to places like Australia, where they will be welcomed.

I see that the practice has got a shiny new website under the Provide banner, I clicked on the 'News' tab and it said there isn't any....

The practice had two branches, mine in town, and another in a nearby village. The letter I had said that the town site was taken by Provide, and the village was going to another local practice, but the website says the new manager controls both sites. The 'Contact Us' page only lists one site.

The staff list contains just one GP for both sites, and they appear to have replaced both the nurses with new ones.

I've just discovered that the practice was all over the media last year in a minor scandal about trying to gag patients from complaining publicly.

Neither her name, nor her treatment.

Eloethan. Do you mean that her name was not on their database?
Or that her treatment was not on their database?

Apparently 160,000 people have had to find new GPs because of surgery closures over the last two years.
Haven't noticed that in the main media. Or have I missed it?

Talking about drug providers, Crun, this bill was defeated by the Libdems in the last parliament. It has now been resurrected.

www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2015/06/05/comment-saatchi-s-advertising-talent-is-pushing-through-a-bi

Looks like it will go through without scrutiny. Completely wrong in my opinion.
Those with any medical knowledge in the commons do not want it to go through. It's just business people who do.

Interesting idea, Eloethan. We have tried in Durham to extract information about private healthcare companies but keep getting told that it's confidential.
The whole point is that it shouldn't be.
It will not do your mum any good but it would be interesting to see if you can get an answer to that question under the FOI act.

My mum is still waiting for an appointment to have a growth on her forehead removed. As I've posted in the past, she has had these growths before and they have been removed within a few months when quite small. This time she has waited over a year and obviously as the growth is bigger it will be harder to remove and more painful afterwards.

Colchester Hospital is in special measures, as are all the hospitals in Essex now. She received a letter some months ago from Colchester Hospital saying that her case would be dealt with by a (private) hospital in Chelmsford. When I phoned that hospital up - because again we had heard nothing re an appointment - I was told she was not on their database and would not be treated by them. They couldn't explain why she had received a letter saying her care had been transferred to them. It occured to me that if a person has been waiting over a year for a procedure and then it is brought to their attention that that procedure could be performed by a private hospital, they might - if they could afford it - pay for it to be done privately. So was it a "mistake" sending the letter out to everyone or was it done in the hope that it would "nudge" some people into opting for private treatment?

But they are not being trialled. The private health providers have put in a bid in opposition to the NHS provider. The trust has to ask for bids because of the new law.
Private providers have an inbuilt advantage as they can claim VAT back, therefore a 20% advantage.
The point here is whether a private company should be able to say that it is NHS.
Many private health companies such as Virgin also do not pay tax in this country. They pay their profits into offshore companies, meaning the NHS misses out twice.

"Why the cover up? Could it be that the government and private companies do not want us to know how may contracts in our NHS are being won by private contractors?"

Of course. If you're developing a trial for a new drug, you use blind tests because if people know what drug they're taking it will prejudice the results. The same applies if you are trialling a new provider of a service.

"You might have heard that since 2012, private companies like Virgin have been running more and more NHS services. But when they run these services, they don’t have to use their own logo – they can hide being the white and blue of the NHS.

Why the cover up? Could it be that the government and private companies do not want us to know how may contracts in our NHS are being won by private contractors?
I’m Ron, I'm a retired GP and NHS Activist from East London. I’m writing because I don’t think that’s right. Patients should know whether or not they’re being treated by the NHS. Please sign this petition now, and let’s ask Virgin to tell us when they’re treating us.

Virgin spends millions promoting their brand. Their logo appears on trains, planes, even wine bottles. But when it comes to a lot of the NHS, they hide away – their logo doesn’t appear anywhere on some of the NHS services they run. They know most of us don’t want to be treated by someone who will profit from our illness, so it’s our job to expose them. Together, we can help shine a light on what’s really happening in our NHS.

Earlier today, activists like myself staged a protest in front of the Virgin Care HQ in London. It’s our way of telling people that some of our NHS services are not what we think they are - they've become Virgin profit centres. Act now, and let's make sure more people know about what's going on in our NHS.

But Virgin are only doing what the government allow them to do. The government lets companies use the NHS logo because they don’t want us to see, every time we use our NHS, that it’s being sold off. That’s why this petition needs to go as widely as it can. The more people who know about Virgin, the more they’ll discover about the sell-off of our NHS. With a new government in power, this is our chance to pressure them to change. Please sign the petition today."
The email I received telling me about Virgin.

action.peoplesnhs.org/page/s/peoples-nhs---virgin-petition

A petition to tell private healthcare company Virgin to let people know where they are instead of hiding behind the NHS logo.