So this is a moan but is not meant to be tarring all GPs with the same brush, there's many excellent ones and I now have one. But so many GPs are useless - disinterested, unwilling to refer, don't listen to their patients, don't call back, don't record notes properly etc. There are of course bad examples in all professions but this seems particularly an issue with GPs. Their role is to gatekeep and they often seem to want to keep the gates firmly shut, regardless of, well anything. Patients go to their GP with serious symptoms multiple times and are just dismissed over and over.
I know the appointment times are short, they have a lot of patients on their caseload, there's lots of work outside of appointments. But lots of public service roles are like that - show me a ward nurse that actually regularly leaves at the end of a 12 hour shift, a social worker that doesn't write up evenings and weekends, teachers who don't lesson plan and mark in their own time etc. And GPs get paid much more than those high pressure roles. Many GPs seem wilfully obtuse, and so surface level in their thinking. If they don't know, then there's often so little curiosity and instead a tendency to assume the patient is exaggerating/lying.
Inspired by a recent thread but more than just that. A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with secondary cancer after months of begging for tests. My father has been trying to get the GP to look into debilitating leg and hip pain, including numb spots and a wet feeling, literally for a year. He was sent for a scan which ended up being of elsewhere in his body(!!) and told everything was fine. I had to push him to advocate for himself and after weeks of phone calls he eventually went to A&E in agony and they sent a "task" to the GP to send him for an urgent scan which has finally been agreed... But while the A&E doc wanted a scan of his abdomen the GP has decided to do his hip first....
Is it because GPs are less about health and more about avoiding spending NHS money?