To think the GP should be able to accept email?

[lisad123]

I need a letter from GP about both DDs autism and other stuff for our holiday to disneyland. We go next week.
The GP will write me a letter at £15 charge and need me to write down what I want them to say .
This week is hard with both girls off and no car and surgery isn't walk able from here.
I called and asked if I could just email it over. Got really snotty woman who said they don't it via email and I have to physically bring the letter in. And then physically go and collect it again.
So am I being unreasonable to think they should consider taking emails, as most people who might need extra letters are normally the sort who might find it harder to get to office?

Emails are not secure. The computers networks either end can be secure, but in between is a free for all.

Do you think it's some red tape regarding patient confidentiality? Emails with people's medical details getting into the wrong hands?

But it's just a letter asking them to write a letter explaining DDs dx.

Could you send your letter in by snail mail (maybe recorded delivery, it shouldn't cost too much) so you only have the one trip to make?

yes, but the system would not be bespoke for you and your particular situation. so it would have to be secure.

i can totally see why they don't get into the whole e-mail thing. they'd be deluged. how could they ever be expected to keep up. things would get lost. people would complain. it would be a nightmare.

and in your situation, when it's a letter for a holiday related matter - essentially a non-core private service - and hardly a medical priority, i can see why they make you do the running. it's not their fault time is limited now. perhaps if it was a more pressing medical matter they might make exceptions and not insist that a less able-bodied patient went in.

I am sure you could post it if you can't get over there and they could post the letter back to you.

And the £15 charge is for the GP and admin staff time so you can go on holiday. It is not something the NHS should cover, so I don't know why the face

I am a GP btw and tbh people's expectations of what we should do for them and how quickly make me a bit never mind

If I did everything on the patient's timescale and accepted email requests I would never go home.

Just post it. No biggie

I agree that the no email thing is a bit stupid - I communicate with my hospital consultant by email, think she had to warn me that it wasn't secure etc etc but as long as I was aware that was fine.

I would think email would be easier on GP tbh, maybe I'm wrong.
The was because £15 for a letter that I have to tell them what to write seems a lot IMO.
Will post it later today, good thinking.

Can you imagine how much email a GP would have if their email address were known to their patients? I have a public facing job, and I am deluged with, mostly irrelevant, email, whenever my email address gets out.

Surely you should be registered to a GP practice you can get to easily?

Emails can be edited and could be misused by people. They only give hard copies of letters for this reason.

"The hmm was because £15 for a letter that I have to tell them what to write seems a lot IMO."

GP's time is worth a lot! This is not really their job, is it? And if they had to compose all the contents themselves it would take longer and cost more. I paid £25 for a form GP had to tick some boxes on for a diet I needed to do. So you got a bargain!

It's like doctors getting paid for writing death certificates. It's not actually part of their job, so it incurs a cost.

They charge for death cert? Wow didn't know that

Yes, we don't do any work for free. We are running a business.

Some work (seeing patients, writing prescriptions etc) we are paid for and the patients get it for 'free'.

Other stuff we are not paid for so we have to charge or do it for free. We do charge for death certificates. The funeral directors charge for their services as well, do they get a face?

It's tricky. I work in a GP surgery and we're very wary of giving patients email contact addresses.

We don't send information between health care professionals about patients using email because of patient confidentiality but the reason we tend not to give out email addresses is that we are absolutely stuffed to the gunnels with work and experience shows us that some patients won't use it for a one off thing but will then start to email us regularly about every little health niggle that they have and we simply don't have time to include into our everyday work schedule.

Of course plenty of people would use and email contact sensibly but we can never know who might take the pee.

My GP lets me email her, it's very useful.

Email is a very thorny issue for GPs. We do of course use email all the time, and almost all UK GPs now have secure email so we can send confidential, patient-identifiable information safely to allow us to refer patients, and communicate with colleagues.

But supplying email contact addresses to patients is another matter entirely. We have robust systems in place to ensure we deal in a timely manner with phonecalls and letters, but emails from patients are easily missed in the vast quantities of other emails coming in. It is far safer NOT to encourage yet another route of communication when it cannot be made foolproof. The risk of missing a patients email describing life-threatening symptoms, for example (and I have seen it happen) is too great.

You are getting a very cheap service; we charge (standard BMA private rates) £20 + VAT upwards per patient for any 'fit to fly' or 'to whom it may concern' or other private letters.

Have a good holiday!

It would need to be a secure system even for what you are asking. Your DD's diagnosis is confidential information. You can choose to tell lots of people or post it on an Internet forum. Your GP cannot, s/he has a duty of confidentiality so that it is your choice who gets to know. Encouraging you to send the letter over email (and even more so returning it via email) would be like having a consultation in the middle of a public space.

Secure web based communication systems aren't that hard to provide, but they aren't trivial and would likely lead to a big impact on work levels at a surgery, especially for reception staff, who would probably need to be gate keepers. Not a decision to be taken lightly in an environment that is already struggling to meet service expectations with current resources.

Tbh I wasn't thinking of GPs direct email, more like admin support who is likely going to write letter anyways.
I have clearly been spoilt with the other proffessionals who work with my girls as email is the way we communicate. As for not secure, in my job in SS reports, letters and emails were often sent, a secure system is very possible.

Death certificates are a legal matter not a medical matter. That is why doctors are paid for writing them. Not by the late patient nor by the family - by the hospital I suppose? Not sure actually but it's definitely not the patient.

Secure between you and other people on same system. That doesn't mean every ones yahoo or hotmail accounts.

I work with local authority social work departments and can't send sensitive information via email. My work email isn't classed as secure.

Sorry that's not clear. I work with them, not for them. Their email is secure, my works isn't.

Well yes, I don't think a single GP at my work (and there are 9 of them) has given out their own email address to a patient, so the few that have managed to wangle an email address mail me or one of my colleagues to pass onto the GP.

If you've never worked in a GP surgery then you probably don't know that every single transaction has to be logged into a patient's electronic file. So and email would have to be saved onto a computer then scanned and saved onto the patient's file with a description of what it is and what medical problem it is referring to. That may only take a couple of minutes but if we have to do that 50 times a day for all kinds of transactions it would take up an awful lot of our time and like I said earlier, we really don't have any spare time at all.