General practitioners are now routinely seeing at least 60 patients a day as part of the “new standard” for primary health care, as extreme delays in ambulances are forcing some doctors to transport people to hospital on their own.
This was stated by Professor Camila Hawthorne, President of the Royal College of General Practitioners. I General practitioners, including themselves, deal with an “undefined” number of patients every day.
She said: “General medicine is the backbone of the NHS – GPs and our teams make the vast majority of contacts with patients and in doing so we take the pressure off the NHS, but our service is struggling. Every month we have many more consultations than before the pandemic.
“It is no exaggeration to say that some general practitioners have 60 or more contacts with patients per day, I myself experienced this when I was on duty in the clinic: it is unsafe and unsustainable.
“The NHS needs adequate funding, resources and a good staffing plan to ensure it remains sustainable and safe for patients for years to come, and a robust GP recruitment and retention plan needs to be the focus. With the right resources, there is so much we could do to revitalize the NHS.
The European Union of General Practitioners and the British Medical Association (BMA) recommend no more than 25 visits per day, but practice lists have increased dramatically in recent years, from an average of less than 7,000 patients in 2014-2015 to more than 9,000 now. . At the same time, the number of general practitioners has decreased.
According to the BMA, there are currently 1,973 fewer fully qualified full-time general practitioners than in September 2015, and an average of 2,206 more patients per practice than in 2015. Thursday.
Dr Lizzy Toberti, head of GPs at the UK Physicians Association, said: “GPs who treat at least 60 patients a day are fast becoming the new normal. A few years ago, for less complex needs, the average was 30 to 35. Some practitioners who report the first few days after the Christmas and New Year holidays report 2 to 3 percent of their practice population (180 to 270 people) on any given day. And we’re just not ready for it.”
Dr. Toberti said the growing problems stemmed from the government’s “pathetic refusal” to take up the issue, as the DAUK on Wednesday issued an open letter to the prime minister urging him to pull MPs out of Christmas break for an emergency state meeting. to get GGD.
A grassroots lobbying organization said a general practitioner in Manchester was forced to take patients to the emergency room due to long waiting times for ambulances, including one patient with sepsis and another at risk of cardiac arrest.
Professor Hawthorne said: “We should never be in situations where GPs or other team members have to transport patients to the hospital when they need urgent treatment. In addition to the potential medico-legal implications, general practitioners are needed in their practice to care for a growing number of patients with increasingly complex health conditions.
“The fact that we are hearing reports of this event is a bad indictment of the extreme pressure that medical professionals face in the NHS, from GP operations to ambulance services, emergency rooms and others. They show the serious crisis the NHS is in and the impact it has on patients and frontline workers, and this needs to be acknowledged and addressed.
TV presenter Dr. Hilary Jones criticized the prime minister for his handling of the NHS and warned it could collapse. Speaking on ITV good morning britainSharing the experience of heartbroken general practitioners, the doctor said that if the situation “does not change very quickly, the NHS will be done.”
Referring to a group chat between 13,000 doctors working on the front lines and in primary health care, he said: “There are thousands of these messages and they are very disturbing. (First) “In our hospital, we have to wait so long to get to the emergency room that we have a physician assistant, ‘auto triage’, on our schedule. This means they spend their entire shift checking on people waiting outside in their cars.”
“Second, a new term this doctor learned this week is re-entry. “(This) term is used to explain the process of throwing a patient out of a secluded booth in the emergency room and moving him into the hallway so that a more critical patient can take his place. We did this so that the patient could not die in the corridor, but somewhere else.
Dr. Jones described how the staff broke down in tears at the end of their shift, “and when they come back for the next shift, the same patient is still waiting for an appointment for 24 hours.”
He said: “For Rishi Sunak and the government to act like it’s not a crisis when over a dozen trusts have announced critical incidents, it’s not just a misconception like the BMA says, I would say it’s bad at best. informed misjudgment. , in the worst case, this is total irresponsibility and incompetence. I have never experienced anything like it. If this is not a crisis, then what is?
“I have never seen the NHS in such a bad situation. And if that doesn’t change soon, the NHS will be done. It is not stable, it will collapse. And that means the worst people, the sickest people, aren’t getting the kind of care we’ve gotten used to over the past few decades.”
In his first major speech this year, Mr Sunak acknowledged that patients are not getting “the care they deserve,” while warning that “something has to change” in the NHS and promising waiting lists will shrink. The government attributed the high number of flu cases, concerns about Covid-19 and Streptococcus A to the particular pressure the NHS faced over Christmas, though health officials warn the problems are long-standing and cannot be explained solely by the pandemic. carry.
Mr Sunak said NHS wait times were “too long” as he promised waiting lists would be reduced. England’s National Health Service previously estimated that the waiting list, which currently stands at more than 7 million people, will shrink around March 2024.
“Covid has created a huge new pressure and people are waiting too long for the help they need,” Sunak said. “We are fixing it, but we still have a lot to do. At a time when we are pouring record amounts of money into the National Health Service and hiring record numbers of doctors and nurses, health workers are still unable to provide the care they need and patients are not getting the care they deserve.
“So we have to recognize that something has to change. This does not mean that structural reforms of the NHS are needed – we will always defend the rationale for the NHS at the time of its use.”
He said the healthcare system should make more use of private hospitals “when needed to serve patients faster and better.”
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Welfare said: “We are extremely grateful for the hard work of the GP teams, which managed 80,000 more GP appointments every working day than last year. We plan to add over a million additional appointments this winter, strengthening our GP teams with other professionals. In November, nearly 83 percent of GP visits were made within two weeks of booking, not counting Covid shots.
“We have tasked NHS England with developing a long-term workforce plan to attract and retain more staff, and compared to September 2019, the number of full-time equivalent general practitioners has increased by almost 2,300. We have increased the number of available General Practitioner positions by 4,000 per year. compared to 2,671 in 2014 and a record 4,032 doctors who were promoted to GP this year.”
Source: I News
I’m Raymond Molina, a professional writer and journalist with over 5 years of experience in the media industry. I currently work for 24 News Reporters, where I write for the health section of their news website. In my role, I am responsible for researching and writing stories on current health trends and issues. My articles are often seen as thought-provoking pieces that provide valuable insight into the state of society’s wellbeing.