To take this further? GP negligence

Edited to withdraw erroneous comment.

I would make a complaint. Sympathies as my GP's are equally useless. They need spoon feeding to do the most basic of things and have a terrible attitude

Be prepared for the complaint to be fobbed off by a sorry / not sorry letter from the practice
I would then escalate it to these people www.ombudsman.org.uk

Ignore the people saying it's just one of those things / you should have chased it. It's not your job, it's the GP's job. The surgery is being paid to do their job, it's hardly a favour

Agreed. You shouldn’t have to follow up with your Gp to check that they’ve done their job and sent the referral.
do you email your child’s school to ask if they’ve managed to complete your child’s report?
do you email your solicitor to remind them to complete the contract for your new house?
do you email Virgin and remind them to send you an invoice for your broadband?

Sometimes. If you’re getting worse, your GP can ask for the referral to be escalated. It may not always work, but it can do.

Say she had been referred as promised and she had followed it up if her child's health had declined, would that have made a difference to the wait time?

It's a sad state of affairs when you have a follow up on whether a doctor has actually done what they were supposed to do 🙄. This has happened to me twice now so I do always check up but it shouldn't be necessary.

You were the one who said you were considering it, but you make it sound as if the person posting this has plucked a nonsensical idea from the air. It came from you.

Yeah, this. And the fact that not once during those ten months did she think to check the NHS app or call up the team to see what was going on.

We’ve had a similar situation with my sister. Referred “urgently “ by the GP. Except she wasn’t, the GP forgot. Despite chasing, checking and being assured the referral has been made. 6 months later and still no scan until she realised her mistake. No formal apology, just excuses about being busy. Once the scan was actually referred she was seen urgently. A full hysterectomy and radiotherapy, and finally on the mend but could have cost her her life.

I’m wondering why you’ve never been back to the GP with your child in the last 10 months if their condition has been deteriorating?

You cannot go privately to jump the NHS list, they closed that loop a few years ago. If you go private you risk losing your nhs spot and are liable for all costs associated with your care.

I’ve voted YABU. I work in an outpatients department et the hospital and everything is always “urgent”

if it was that urgent you’d have followed it up a lot sooner

Being a parent/carer is just incredibly challenging. Very few people “choose” it, yet somehow the “system” makes it feel like they think we did. And it’s just repeated trauma again and again - each time you have to explain it all again for the bloody umpteenth time. Oh and then we have to actually care for our child.

i do understand. And I’d be so upset to have missed something like this (in my work role).

but honestly, I don’t get why a patient would choose to go to the media to complain at this point. Your GP hasn’t had a chance to explain or apologise yet. Obviously they might have maliciously and deceitfully actively decided to not refer just to be awful. But it’s very unlikely, isn’t it? More likely that they are human, made an error and it’d just be miserable to be dragged through the papers for it…

I don’t think the GP can dictate the workload of another medical professional. They would describe the issue and then the specialist would decide if a priority based on their other referrals and current workload.

People make mistakes. I can see why you’re upset but aggressively attacking the GP won’t achieve much.

A family member is a gp and is receiving treatment for cancer in her 40s. She’s convinced the stress and pressure of the job contributed to her cancer.

What's happened to the UK health service? It seems shite. I don't live there but always thought it was like ours. Car crash/ heart attack etc, straight in and staying as long as it takes with no charge. Broken arm, might be a few hours wait but given painkillers and moved to a "layback" chair immediately with a cannula set up for any pain meds.
Gp's are free for under 16's and pensioners and those on benefits ( other pay about 15 -20 pounds guessing).
Free Gp centres, but you have to wait, maybe you get lucky and it's only 30 minutes or it can be a few hours.
Blood tests and x-rays are free for everyone. You just walk in with your referral whenever you feel up to it and then wave bye to the receptionist. Never waited longer than an hour.
CT and MRI you have to pay towards if you arent a pensioner or child and are not an in-patient in a hospital , in which case it's free. I'd day 100 pounds max ( trying to convert currencies).
And you can always see a GP the same day. It might not be your preferred one but you will see one.
If not don't worry, if you live anywhere vaguely near a city , then you can call a GP to come to your home. They start at 6pm . No charge to a citizen. Not available regionally which is a flaw. Just due to a lack of regional doctors.
Not sure why you don't have something like that, as size wise the UK is pretty small so should be able to cover most areas pretty easily.
Best wishes OP!

MP won't be able to get pt bumped up list! I would expect GP surgery to liaise with colleagues to whom the referral should have been made and grovel to allow the pt to get on the WL at the point they would have been had the referral been done when it should have been. I work in complaints for NHS. MPs writing to us does not mean people get seen sooner at the expense of others and nor should it.

You can see referrals and wait times on the NHS app.

I always check this weekly and make sure a referral has been done. If not I chase it up.

The culture of the NHS/healthcare now is to expect complaints and litigation. It is seen as part of the job. Mistakes are made in every profession. A complaint would help them identify a process that may help prevent this happening again and for the GP to reflect on their own practice.

On your part as you have said you should have chased it up more too. We should not be passive in our own responsibilities for our own and our children’s healthcare.

I had something similar with my DC. A temporary GP didnt put in the referral and when I called for details with who to follow up with, I found it was never completed. I put in a complaint with the practice manager, PALs at the hospital he was referred to, called the referral line and explained and asked to be contacted if there are any last minute cancellations. I was emailed an appointment that same day for a week later.

they will contact primary care and advocate for you to be seen

I understand your upset and feel for you but voted yabu.

It's an admin error and an oversight but it's not negligence or deliberate. By making a written complaint to the practice you can help ensure that better systems are looked into/set up to help avoid it happening again. That's reasonable.

To mitigate the delay you can wait for the referral to go through and then chase with the secretary to ask to attend a cancellation or short notice appointment. You can also contact them with concerns re deteriorating symptoms and ask to be reprioritised.

The main issue is that the system is underfunded and overloaded and that the wait times are unreasonable, even if and when referred. These are the issues I would raise with the ICB and MP.

Baying for blood and the contrition of an overworked HCP who made a mistake which at this point hasn't yet had any material negative impact on you or your child's condition is misplaced energy and unlikely to help how you feel about it all at the end.

The GPs I know are really decent people trying their absolute best, knowing that the despite their best efforts, the patient experience is not good. We need them to keep trying and keep turning up, so pushing too hard on an innocent error could be the straw that breaks a back and I'd be so wary of that.

If I was being less kind, I would say that I would never have just sat back and waited for such a long period without some paper trail of where the referral was at. Because locally although the wait for an appointment may be long, you still get notified of the referral and the fact that you're waiting. If I'd been worried about symptoms in the wait, I would have spoken to the GP in the meantime as they remain responsible for care while you're waiting. So some of your frustration may also be at yourself.

If I understand it correctly there was a 12 month wait, and now with two months left you've found out you're actually not on the list?
If so (with the obvious caveat that I'm not your lawyer and just setting out what I can see from the limited info) this isn't negligence. Negligence requires a failure which causes an injury/loss. There's an apparent failure here but your child's still in the same position - still on a list. So any deterioration since the referral should have been made is not due to the failure, it would have happened anyway with the 12 month wait.

In order to avoid any injury coming of this, I'd agree with others to tell GP how disappointed and upset you are, explain the deterioration, and seek a more urgent referral. If this doesn't work and the wait will be injurious, you could send a letter to your GP to pass to their insurer asking for the cost of a private referral in settlement of any claim. But try to get actual legal advice before doing that. Best bet, I'd think, would be to speak to GP (or another GP in same practice)

I’m sorry to hear that this has happened. I am a GP and have submitted thousands of referrals over the years. Out of those thousands, there have been two instances where I have neglected to submit a referral that I had intended to. On both occasions I felt awful about it and apologised profusely to the patients concerned. Unfortunately with the sheer quantity and intensity of work that we undertake on a day to day basis, human errors do inevitably happen. I appreciate however when you or your family are the ones suffering as a result of an error then it must be incredibly frustrating and I can understand your desIre for retribution against the GP who made the mistake.

Unfortunately even in these circumstances, as GPs we have no power to compel the hospital to expedite a patient’s referral to compensate for our error. I would certainly explain the situation when referring in the hope that the triaging consultant might take pity and try to speed things along, and if your child’s clinical condition has worsened then this should be emphasised in the referral as it may influence the urgency with which they are seen, but ultimately the decision lies with secondary care.

I do hope that you are not waiting too long to be seen. All the best to you and your child.