To think GPs should do their job

[Wotnokids]

Just heard the news that £250million is to be made available to GPs to 'increase the amount of face to face appointments'. AIBU to think this is just extra cash for doing their job?

Have you got a problem with GPS working part time hours? I assume they get pro rata like everyone else who works part time. If you start insisting they work 5 days a week there will be even fewer.

A GP I know does indeed work part time in
Surgery but in addition to that she lectures because new GP's actually need to be trained you know! Once she's done these two jobs she works as tge on-call GP for tge out of hours service. She also has primary school aged children!
She works incredibly long hours and earns pro rata wages for her part time hours, nowhere close to 100K!

The NHS is hideously underfunded and has been for years so blame the people in charge of ensuring these services are run properly, not the highly skilled people working themselves to death trying to keep it running on a shoe string.

A supermarket worker is indeed a thankless, exhausting job but let's not pretend it's the same pressure as being a GP. Everyone's work is worthwhile, whether you're making sure people can get food, teaching children, cleaning loos, writing code, the list goes on. But not all of those have the same responsibility. I feel pressured in my admin job, but nobody will die if I make a mistake.

I think "anti-GP" rhetoric has come about from people's recent experiences in trying to access them rather from some media campaign

Hi OP are you one of Boris’s spin doctors by any chance?
You are doing a good job of pulling the wool over the public’s eyes by the way.

Being a GP is an expert job with an incredible amount of responsibility. If the government hadn't run the NHS into the ground and had sorted out training properly then we wouldn't be in this mess. See also record shortages of nurses and midwives.

@Changednamehere56

They are doing their jobs.

I'm sure some of them are. However, both my mother and husband tried, without success, for MONTHS to get face-to-face appointments. A bloody telephone appointment for what my mother has, eventually, been diagnosed with is neither helpful or representative of what GPs exist for in the first place.

I've watched my poor mother disintegrate mentally over the past few months, frustrated and upset by her GPs inaction and refusal to handle the simplest of tasks without managing to fuck it up - from prescribing incorrect medicine (three times) to failing to provide referrals for private scans and care costing thousands of pounds because he's so insistent that if there really is an issue, mum should just got to A&E (which she has, six times). Frankly, he was abysmal before Covid (buggering up numerous times where my grandmother, before she passed, was concerned), so he's a definite example of a GP using Covid as an excuse to hide from his patients for as long as possible. The actual GP aside, the whole practice seems to run on a mix of 'blame everyone else' and 'ignore the problem'.

My/husband's GP is similarly poor, though not as openly incompetent as my mother's. He's got a telephone appointment tomorrow for a issue that appears to be a piece of detached bone floating about in one of his thumbs (diy accident). It's not an emergency, but it is causing him a moderate amount of pain. I'm not sure quite how a frigging telephone appointment is supposed to be useful.

BOTH our GP and my mother's are refusing ALL face to face appointments. It's not acceptable and patients need to push, hard, on this because otherwise the way it is now will be the way it'll be from now on. It's not GPs or patients 'fault' that Covid happened, but nor is it practical, useful or fair to expect us to simply accept that face-to-face appointments are now the exception rather than the rule. That's not what GPs exist for. They either do their jobs - as they should be done, involving face-to-face patient care - or we re-invent the entire basis of primary care from the ground up. I think I know which way GP care in the UK is going, though, and trying to have as little interaction with patients as possible currently seems to be quite a large factor.

We have 2.8 doctors per 100,000 in England. One of the lowest in OECD.

To run the NHS more effectively we need more GP's.

Sorry per 1000 NOT 100,000!! Trying to multi task

I also work long days for not amazing pay but that's the choice I made. Medics tend to be highly motivated and dare I say it often status driven people - if GP isn't an attractive role then they'll just go into other areas of medicine or abroad. This is already evident in the shortage of GPs. We can't force people to do the role but there's a rhetoric in the media that GPs somehow owe the public something. I also really doubt they earn £100k for 3.5 days - I just don't think that's right from the doctors I know!

DH is a vet so was the animal/private equivalent of a GP for a while. Consulting is apparently much harder mentally than operating - most vet practices build in a mix of consulting and operating time to each vets day to increase performance.

Also "sessions" count only the time spent consulting rather than all the associated patient and practice admin so 3.5 "days" consulting is easily 50 hours actual work...

Honestly my GP has been amazing through the pandemic, he's just referred me through to the hospital though who have said they won't see me and take out my 7cm kidney stone because they aren't doing routine appointments 😒

@Seashor

Have a go at doing their thanklessly exhausting job then come back and tell us.

Nonsense. They’re not special beings working for a charity. They’re paid to do a job and they have been trying to get away with not doing some of it - seeing people face to face. Lots of people are doing thankless jobs, you wouldn’t accept it from them. To be honest this kind of hypocrisy only comes from those who don’t need to healthcare. Try speaking to someone who needed to see a GP.

This is not the fault of GPs. Not enough of them. Huge job vacancies. Very demanding and stressful job.

If it's such a well paid easy job, why aren't people queuing up to do It? Because it's fucking hard. The way GP practices are run, unless you are salaried. Not enough people want to do it. Demand for their time is rising relentlessly.

So of course, slate them. That will help

It's so ridiculous. GPs are working incredibly hard, seeing more patients than ever before, dealing with increasingly complex issues, delivering covid and flu vaccines. You really have no idea. There is a desperate shortage of GPs with many now working double their contracted hours in a week.

@Wotnokids

Just heard the news that £250million is to be made available to GPs to 'increase the amount of face to face appointments'. AIBU to think this is just extra cash for doing their job?

I’ll pass the message on to my GP DH. Average working day is 8am to 10pm. Seeing remotely and f2f more patients than over. Thankfully for him, he is giving the contract back at the end of this month (after 20 years), the locums are returning to their own countries and 10,000 patients will need to find another GP.

@brittleheadgirl

My job is 'endlessly exhausting' I'm an early years teacher, in a large, very diverse inner city school. I'm paid at least, half maybe a third what a gp earns. The public are tired of gps still not returning to 'normal' and still not offering face to face appointments. I'm not surprised that people are angry. I like many have worked face to face throughout the pandemic and for a large part of it I was unvaccinated too.

And you’ve fallen for the divide and conquer trick.

Teachers’ conditions have been appalling. There are far too far few GPs to go round. It’s not a competition.

I completely agree people should be able to see a GP when they need to. The problem is, there are not enough GPs to go round. Maybe each patient should have 2 minutes only? Squeeze more people through. That might work.

I wouldn't be a GP. Horrendously stressful and thankless.

for Parker231 and your DH.

My gp surgery recently hired a new person who called to explain the new blood test booking procedure. I need a blood test before I can get more medication for a chronic illness. My medication was changed back in January and I need it checked to see if this is the right dose.

My gp is being proactive rather than reactive and this person is helping them. They definitely do need a helping hand to help things run more smoother.

I think there needs to be more training places for nurses to become practice nurses too.

I prefer the phone appointments, and would happily continue to have them forever if I and the doctor doesn’t feel the need to see one face to face, freeing up slots for people who do.

Our GP practice have done their job all through the pandemic - that is my experience anyway.

I saw my GP At the height of the first lockdown for a breast exam. I saw her last month in relation to my mental health following the death of a close relative. I saw them again last week for another physical examination.

Both of my children have been seen over the course of the pandemic with tonsillitis.

Yes we have also had telephone appointments which I have been more than happy with, as I felt the issues could be dealt with via the telephone. Each time I’ve been in the surgery it has been very quiet - so I do know that they are doing less face to face appointments than before. But we’ve always seen a GP when we have needed to.

The real problem is no one wants to spend years training for these jobs as it’s too much stress for the salary paid. People in professions are not respected anymore, might as well go work in a non professional job

Don't do that ask/answer question thing *Queen'. It is twattish. And look at all these people obediently doing the government's job for them without even the faintest shadow of critical thinking.

@Wotnokids

Recent figures show average GP works 3 1/2 days and average salary is over £100k. By definition, that means some do lots more time but also some do less. Same with salary. My issue is not what they get paid but that additional funding is being provided from the existing NHS budget (so where will the cuts fall to pay for it?) for doing something they should already be doing!

So you think GPs should work at least 60 hours a week?