Booking a doctor's appointment

Funkfingers · May 13

Rob1742 said:

I rang up bupa, was in within a week and out with a cream. £200 out of pocket but I would pay that any day rather than go through all the hassle of seeing an NHS doctor.

This is precisely what the NHS - and the government - is banking on.

My anecdotal experience from family, friends and neighbours is that you need to be approximately one week away from dying to receive prompt medical attention.

The NHS remains hamstrung by the Nineteen-Fifties idealism that wonderful medical services could and should be provided free at the point of delivery. This business model has been unsustainable for decades.

Stratavarious · May 13

Is everyone using the new NHS app? The older systems the GP used were horrible.

When I was needing something looked at, I filled in a few details and they were reviewed by someone and I got a call same day to discuss and arrange an appointment when it was clear I’d need some tests. All very slick as were the follow up appointment. I also got all the test results the Dr saw and discussed and the prescription. All very slick.

Better to triage like that than have a tonne of less key cases turn up just for a chat and reassurance.

wizbit81 · May 13

Ok, here's the truth of it and you can argue all you like but you're wrong if you do because this is factual not opinion. I'm all for complaining about the running down and destruction of the NHS, but having a dig at the men and women burning themselves out for your moany old entitled white man arses is not ok.

1. Yes the Tory party have utterly f*cked up Primary Care so that what was same day on average for GP appointments under last Labour gov (yes it was look it up) has changed into waiting an average of a month now for a routine appointment. This is part of their entirely deliberate plan to ruin the NHS then declare it broken and say only the private sector can save it. An example of this is the funding for it, great chart on this page:

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-budget-nutshell

The calculation made by Labour was that to keep pace with the needs of a growing elderly population as people were living longer we would need a 5.5% increase in the budget year on year. Tory party got in and dropped it to 1.1% for 6 years then 2.8% from 2016 onwards. At 1.1% that was below inflation, as it has been last 2 years. They say 'record budgets' to hide the fact they are not funding the growing needs of the population. C*nts. Oh, and for anyone that comes out with the 'you can't keep giving them more money forever, it needs reforming not more money!' did you know that every quid spent on the NHS returns 3 quid back from a healthier working population?

2. Note I said ROUTINE appointment. Every surgery keeps a block of same day appointments that get given out for acute issues. If you have an ingrowing toenail, yeah sure wait a month. If you have a serious problem they will see you same day, or refer you to a local hospital if necessary. There is usually an on-call Doctor who has no routine appointments booked in who fulfils this role, and they are often very late home because of the sheer amount of people who want/need seeing urgently. Also....at least 90% of people who phone and say it's urgent are morons and it's not.

3. Training, yes they all need it and do it and that's on top of 10 hours of listening to moany old b*stards like you lot plus admin a day. At my local GP they start work at 8 and are all still there at 18:30 doing admin, prescriptions etc.

4. There are thousands more patients per GP surgery than there were....and with mental health services in crisis and community care defunded and destroyed GP's are picking up more and more responsibilities because there is no-one else. Primary Care is on its knees.

5. It's such a horrible job now, GP's are retiring early it's so bad, leaving the country, leaving the profession etc.

6. The latest Conservative bungle is to allocate a load of money to Primary Care but explicitly rule it to be only for non-GP roles at surgeries. This has meant surgeries CAN'T AFFORD TO EMPLOY MORE GP'S, and instead take nurses and Physicians assistants who while doing important jobs themselves can't plug the gap that's currently yawning.

darthed1981 · May 13

Full list of issues with the NHS below...

1. Not enough money after years of Tory funding cuts in real terms while the population grows and ages...

2. Err... that's it.

darthed1981 · May 13

To add to the above if you really want to blame the staff, a lot of whom risked their lives to treat patients through Covid with insufficient PPE because the government gave all the money, and then a peerage to Michelle Mone..

God it makes my blood fucking boil...

Philly_Q · May 13

VimFuego said:

Philly_Q said:

@VimFuego I appreciate you see things from the other side, but we're not just being old men shouting at clouds, these are genuine frustrations (I'm talking about getting GP appointments, not the training thing - I realise that CPD, as we'd call it in my job, is essential).

being on the other side of it (something like 80% of our jobs are things that either a GP should've dealt with or have been left too long and now require hospital urgent treatment, this is having a knock on effect of staff burnout in the ambulance service). At no point did I say your frustrations aren't valid, literally the only thing I complained about was the poorly informed rant about GP training time. I realise that it is frustrating getting a GP appointment, all I did was talk about my personal experiences. Nothing I have said takes away anything from you, and nothing I have said is untrue or incorrect.

Noted and appreciated. I really wasn't trying to start an argument.

Kurtis · May 13

wizbit81 said:

Ok, here's the truth of it and you can argue all you like but you're wrong if you do because this is factual not opinion. I'm all for complaining about the running down and destruction of the NHS, but having a dig at the men and women burning themselves out for your moany old entitled white man arses is not ok.

1. Yes the Tory party have utterly f*cked up Primary Care so that what was same day on average for GP appointments under last Labour gov (yes it was look it up) has changed into waiting an average of a month now for a routine appointment. This is part of their entirely deliberate plan to ruin the NHS then declare it broken and say only the private sector can save it. An example of this is the funding for it, great chart on this page:

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-budget-nutshell

The calculation made by Labour was that to keep pace with the needs of a growing elderly population as people were living longer we would need a 5.5% increase in the budget year on year. Tory party got in and dropped it to 1.1% for 6 years then 2.8% from 2016 onwards. At 1.1% that was below inflation, as it has been last 2 years. They say 'record budgets' to hide the fact they are not funding the growing needs of the population. C*nts. Oh, and for anyone that comes out with the 'you can't keep giving them more money forever, it needs reforming not more money!' did you know that every quid spent on the NHS returns 3 quid back from a healthier working population?

2. Note I said ROUTINE appointment. Every surgery keeps a block of same day appointments that get given out for acute issues. If you have an ingrowing toenail, yeah sure wait a month. If you have a serious problem they will see you same day, or refer you to a local hospital if necessary. There is usually an on-call Doctor who has no routine appointments booked in who fulfils this role, and they are often very late home because of the sheer amount of people who want/need seeing urgently. Also....at least 90% of people who phone and say it's urgent are morons and it's not.

3. Training, yes they all need it and do it and that's on top of 10 hours of listening to moany old b*stards like you lot plus admin a day. At my local GP they start work at 8 and are all still there at 18:30 doing admin, prescriptions etc.

4. There are thousands more patients per GP surgery than there were....and with mental health services in crisis and community care defunded and destroyed GP's are picking up more and more responsibilities because there is no-one else. Primary Care is on its knees.

5. It's such a horrible job now, GP's are retiring early it's so bad, leaving the country, leaving the profession etc.

6. The latest Conservative bungle is to allocate a load of money to Primary Care but explicitly rule it to be only for non-GP roles at surgeries. This has meant surgeries CAN'T AFFORD TO EMPLOY MORE GP'S, and instead take nurses and Physicians assistants who while doing important jobs themselves can't plug the gap that's currently yawning.

It seems that most people aren't complaining about the workers, it’s just that how all that stuff you mentioned presents it's self to most people is not being able to get an appointment etc.

It's not bad here so seems like it very much depends on where you are. I'm fairly rural too.
Can they just not get doctors/staff in some areas in particular? Money not being dispersed properly?
What's the connection?

digitalscream · May 13

wizbit81 said:

...for your moany old entitled white man arses is not ok.

Oh, do knock it off. Although well done - racism, ageism and sexism all in one sentence, I guess that should be...congratulated?

All of the things here are true. And, in fact, a combination of them - the impossibility of getting prompt access to treatment, repeated incompetence with regard to testing and broken-by-design systems and policies employed by the private companies taking over and consolidating GP practices - nearly actually killed my wife on two separate occasions in the last two years, as well as being the direct cause of the damage to her spine which means she's now disabled and she'll be in constant pain for the rest of her life.

That last one was over 10 years ago, long before the Tories' policies had a chance to directly damage the NHS, and was a direct result of a dismissive attitude from a series of doctors, nurses and administrative staff who all just passed the buck and completely ignored the actual problem. In the end, it took a private surgeon to clean up the mess they'd left as best he could; if she'd been treated even adequately when she first presented with a textbook slipped disc, none of that would've happened. One receptionist even told her to stop calling and bothering them when "there are people with real medical issues who need our attention".

These problems are very, very real and they're not just a bunch of old white guys moaning - every single condition which is put off by the processes the NHS is now using across the country is a condition that is going to get worse and cost even more to deal with later (unless the patient dies in the meantime). There are real consequences. I absolutely don't doubt that most NHS staff are good people, but pretending that all NHS staff are angels and relying on lazy tropes in order to dismiss real concerns and problems does absolutely nothing for your argument.

In summary...take your sanctimonious bullshit and shove it. Alternatively, hold back on the bullshit and stick to the facts, and you might actually have a point that's worth something.

mgaw · May 13

wizbit81 said:

Ok, here's the truth of it and you can argue all you like but you're wrong if you do because this is factual not opinion. I'm all for complaining about the running down and destruction of the NHS, but having a dig at the men and women burning themselves out for your moany old entitled white man arses is not ok.

1. Yes the Tory party have utterly f*cked up Primary Care so that what was same day on average for GP appointments under last Labour gov (yes it was look it up) has changed into waiting an average of a month now for a routine appointment. This is part of their entirely deliberate plan to ruin the NHS then declare it broken and say only the private sector can save it. An example of this is the funding for it, great chart on this page:

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-budget-nutshell

The calculation made by Labour was that to keep pace with the needs of a growing elderly population as people were living longer we would need a 5.5% increase in the budget year on year. Tory party got in and dropped it to 1.1% for 6 years then 2.8% from 2016 onwards. At 1.1% that was below inflation, as it has been last 2 years. They say 'record budgets' to hide the fact they are not funding the growing needs of the population. C*nts. Oh, and for anyone that comes out with the 'you can't keep giving them more money forever, it needs reforming not more money!' did you know that every quid spent on the NHS returns 3 quid back from a healthier working population?

2. Note I said ROUTINE appointment. Every surgery keeps a block of same day appointments that get given out for acute issues. If you have an ingrowing toenail, yeah sure wait a month. If you have a serious problem they will see you same day, or refer you to a local hospital if necessary. There is usually an on-call Doctor who has no routine appointments booked in who fulfils this role, and they are often very late home because of the sheer amount of people who want/need seeing urgently. Also....at least 90% of people who phone and say it's urgent are morons and it's not.

3. Training, yes they all need it and do it and that's on top of 10 hours of listening to moany old b*stards like you lot plus admin a day. At my local GP they start work at 8 and are all still there at 18:30 doing admin, prescriptions etc.

4. There are thousands more patients per GP surgery than there were....and with mental health services in crisis and community care defunded and destroyed GP's are picking up more and more responsibilities because there is no-one else. Primary Care is on its knees.

5. It's such a horrible job now, GP's are retiring early it's so bad, leaving the country, leaving the profession etc.

6. The latest Conservative bungle is to allocate a load of money to Primary Care but explicitly rule it to be only for non-GP roles at surgeries. This has meant surgeries CAN'T AFFORD TO EMPLOY MORE GP'S, and instead take nurses and Physicians assistants who while doing important jobs themselves can't plug the gap that's currently yawning.

My wife is a GP and all of the above is spot on!

wizbit81 · May 13

mgaw said:

wizbit81 said:

Ok, here's the truth of it and you can argue all you like but you're wrong if you do because this is factual not opinion. I'm all for complaining about the running down and destruction of the NHS, but having a dig at the men and women burning themselves out for your moany old entitled white man arses is not ok.

1. Yes the Tory party have utterly f*cked up Primary Care so that what was same day on average for GP appointments under last Labour gov (yes it was look it up) has changed into waiting an average of a month now for a routine appointment. This is part of their entirely deliberate plan to ruin the NHS then declare it broken and say only the private sector can save it. An example of this is the funding for it, great chart on this page:

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-budget-nutshell

The calculation made by Labour was that to keep pace with the needs of a growing elderly population as people were living longer we would need a 5.5% increase in the budget year on year. Tory party got in and dropped it to 1.1% for 6 years then 2.8% from 2016 onwards. At 1.1% that was below inflation, as it has been last 2 years. They say 'record budgets' to hide the fact they are not funding the growing needs of the population. C*nts. Oh, and for anyone that comes out with the 'you can't keep giving them more money forever, it needs reforming not more money!' did you know that every quid spent on the NHS returns 3 quid back from a healthier working population?

2. Note I said ROUTINE appointment. Every surgery keeps a block of same day appointments that get given out for acute issues. If you have an ingrowing toenail, yeah sure wait a month. If you have a serious problem they will see you same day, or refer you to a local hospital if necessary. There is usually an on-call Doctor who has no routine appointments booked in who fulfils this role, and they are often very late home because of the sheer amount of people who want/need seeing urgently. Also....at least 90% of people who phone and say it's urgent are morons and it's not.

3. Training, yes they all need it and do it and that's on top of 10 hours of listening to moany old b*stards like you lot plus admin a day. At my local GP they start work at 8 and are all still there at 18:30 doing admin, prescriptions etc.

4. There are thousands more patients per GP surgery than there were....and with mental health services in crisis and community care defunded and destroyed GP's are picking up more and more responsibilities because there is no-one else. Primary Care is on its knees.

5. It's such a horrible job now, GP's are retiring early it's so bad, leaving the country, leaving the profession etc.

6. The latest Conservative bungle is to allocate a load of money to Primary Care but explicitly rule it to be only for non-GP roles at surgeries. This has meant surgeries CAN'T AFFORD TO EMPLOY MORE GP'S, and instead take nurses and Physicians assistants who while doing important jobs themselves can't plug the gap that's currently yawning.

My wife is a GP and all of the above is spot on!

Thanks mate, so is mine, as are many of our friends, and I've got 9 years of healthcare experience behind me as well although mine wasn't front line as I don't know my ars3 from my elbow when it comes to medicine. As has been said earlier in here they went in during Covid with no PPE quite often because there was none, and my other half saw tonnes of complete idiots who actually came into the surgery WITH OBVIOUS COVID, who then moaned about.....guess what...not getting to see a GP, often while sat in front of one.

@digitalscream I'm so sorry for that clearly appalling experience your family have had, but that's nothing to do with me, so seeing as it's fine to talk like you just did to me I'll reply in kind like I would in the pub... f*ck off talking to me like that. You're right not every healthcare practitioner is a saint, and I never said they were, and yes some horrendous mistakes can and do happen and even a single one is horrible but I'll tell you this, not every patient is a reasonable or decent person either, and for every Doc/Nurse doing their best there's hundreds of morons, hundreds of moaning b*stards, and hundreds of abusive d1ckheads too, and like I said while talking about what's been happening to the NHS is a disgrace, which it is, I won't abide a pile on when it comes to the staff, and it's not 'sanctimonious bullshit' to defend them or to point out what's actually gone on with the funding and collapse of services. Facts aren't opinions and facts aren't sanctimonius. I also won't take it when there's a load of lazy and untrue comments like there are in this thread, if you want to mention tropes go pick on Dominic with his 'they are always training and not doing any work' or the other chaps with the 'you can't see a GP unless you're dying' or just plain old 'you can't see a GP at all ever in the history of man anymore'
As for my comments being ageist, sexist, and racist....well.....that's horseshit, old white and male (and definitely moany) is an accurate observation of the demographic of this site and quite clearly of this thread. We (and I class myself here too) are privilged old white male moany fuckers in general, just look at how much time we waste pissing and moaning about Gibson changing a finish option or something. I just actually give a damn about this particular topic so I'll pipe up and call it out.

I'm not going to comment again because I'm not into arguing as has been proven a million times you can't change people's minds on the internet. I just wanted to enter a few facts into the record which has now been done.

CavemanGrogg · May 13

VimFuego said:

last time I used my GP, I did the online triage thing. About 2 hours later a GP called me to set up a blood test for that day and face to face for the next week. All very smooth and easy.

That actually sounds like rubbish service compared to what my cousin was getting before he went private. No joking here, and this was before COVID, all the lockdowns, and booking a Dr appointment had to be done online, so back when there was the mad dash at 8am to get through on the phone to hopefully get an appointment. My cousin would start calling at 5 to 8am to hopefully get though and get an appointment, and whether he managed to get an appointment or not, without failure, he would get a call back from either his GP or the surgerys pharmacist, literally telling him, ''you know those nasty medications you really don't like and have really nasty side effects, including addiction, pill fixation, isolationism, and things like depression* - I'm talking about really strong opiates here including synthetic ones basically the shit that is responsible for the opioid crisis in America, which are so bad that they require extra medication to help you cope with all the truly nasty side effects that people taking the medicine are guaranteed to get, and you're desperate to either reduce your dose or get off of them completely, well we've just doubled your dose of them, and the medication you need to take to cope with the side effects, just pop down to your pharmacist they're waiting for you to pick it up, so you have no need to see your GP, pain specialist, or the surgerys pharmacist''. My cousin has had his prescription for things like opiates - he's on extremely high dosages of these, Valium - again very very high dosages well beyond what any recreational user would take in a day my cousin takes first thing in the morning and 5 more times throughout the day, and other medications that have very high street values and recreational usage, probably a dozen times without having to see or even talk to a medical professional, just a call trying to get a Dr appointment to the surgery receptionist. As a person who is known to be a recreational drug user on here, I personally find what was happening to be unacceptably shocking, truly not just shocking, it was also beyond disgusting and very scary.

*Not joking here, if you've noticed the fairly new medicine safety advice posters they are displaying in Boots - these safety posters are meant more for the staff than customers, this is medication where it is very very dangerous for him to stop taking overnight, he has to be weaned off of them if he can ever get off of them, and given his dosage, this will take years, and this is the very fist warning on these safety posters - it's that dangerous to stop taking them overnight that the shock to the body of such a sudden stop in taking them can kill, and apparently - according to the warning on the medicine safety poster, they're - the pharmacist, is meant to hand out these medicines to people who have a history of being prescribed them, and at the dose they have a history of being prescribed - once you're prescribed these medicines the odds that you will be taking them for the rest of your life is well over 80%, if they run out, even if they don't have a current prescription for them for that date, due to how dangerous stopping taking them overnight is - they won't hand out a full months worth just enough to tide you over until you can see a Dr or the surgery's pharmacist.

mgaw · May 14

Deleted

Emp_Fab · May 14

Let's not fight amongst each other. We're the poor bastards struggling to get healthcare for ourselves and families whilst the cunts that caused this are getting immediate world-class care in Harley St.

DavidR · May 14

I was a f/t GP principal for 25y and retired in 2010 (primarily because my younger colleagues no longer wanted to work the traditional model of English GP).

The disappearance of that model has several causes.

1. The retirement of f/t property-owning self-employed GP principals working in partnership and prepared to cover 24/7 including acute care. Most GP’s now are the opposite of all those things.

2. Younger GP’s want a better work/life balance and avoidance of burnout and what they call ‘moral distress’.

3. Few doctors want to do GP.

In GP land you can have a high salary, provide a top-notch service or a have lot of time off but you can’t have all 3. They won’t tell you this but most NHS GP’s currently only see patients 3 or 4 days a week tops. Dr. Finlay they ain’t. They refer a lot.

My practice has 7 names up outside but 3 times in the last year we have received messages via the NHS app that there are no doctors in that day so don’t bother.

I would advise no longer looking for traditional English General Practice because it’s gone. Go private. If you can afford it.

P.S. wrt thread - GP in Scotland may be better because the Scots receive significantly more NHS £’s per capita then the English from the UK tax payer. Info only.

mgaw · May 14

DavidR said:

I was a f/t GP principal for 25y and retired in 2010 (primarily because my younger colleagues no longer wanted to work the traditional model of English GP).

The disappearance of that model has several causes.

1. The retirement of f/t property-owning self-employed GP principals working in partnership and prepared to cover 24/7 including acute care. Most GP’s now are the opposite of all those things.

2. Younger GP’s want a better work/life balance and avoidance of burnout and what they call ‘moral distress’.

3. Few doctors want to do GP.

In GP land you can have a high salary, provide a top-notch service or a have lot of time off but you can’t have all 3. They won’t tell you this but most NHS GP’s currently only see patients 3 or 4 days a week tops. Dr. Finlay they ain’t. They refer a lot.

My practice has 7 names up outside but 3 times in the last year we have received messages via the NHS app that there are no doctors in that day so don’t bother.

I would advise no longer looking for traditional English General Practice because it’s gone. Go private. If you can afford it.

P.S. wrt thread - GP in Scotland may be better because the Scots receive significantly more NHS £’s per capita then the English from the UK tax payer. Info only.

Mrs Mgaw sees patients 4 days a week, which generates enough paperwork to ensure she goes in for another day and a half (unpaid) to c stay on top of things,

they ain’t Dr Finlay for sure but looks to me like they are working pretty hard

digitalscream · May 14

wizbit81 said:

<blah>

You completely missed my point.

DavidR said:

I would advise no longer looking for traditional English General Practice because it’s gone. Go private. If you can afford it.

Or look for a GP who does both private and NHS. Mine does (we switched to a smaller practice outside of town to get away from Lakeside), and as a result will offer treatments that aren't available on the NHS because the NHS is either not capable of providing them any more or has arbitrary rules that are rooted in the 1980s. It feels shit to be effectively giving in to the government's picture of what healthcare should look like, but it's also a case of practicality.

DavidR · May 14

@mgaw When I worked I got up at 06:00 to do paperwork and worked a 60 hour week. I’m not defending that working model and Mrs. M is sensible not to work it.

The point I’m making is that things have changed and are not coming back. The public are imagining and expecting a service which, in fact, no longer exists.

DefaultM · May 14

I’ve just tried to book one for my son. It opens from 08:00 so as soon as it turns 7:59 I start calling every few seconds. It was closed and then suddenly bang on 08:00 it told me the queues were so large it couldn’t put me in to it.

I feel like people must be doing some kind of trick, maybe trying to get through with multiple phones at the same time because I just don’t get it otherwise.

fastonebaz · May 14

I booked a GP appt this morning.

829am open the NHS app
830am click appts and browse availability
831am have one booked for Friday
832am cough my guts up, roll over and go back to sleep

Offset · May 14

wizbit81 said:

mgaw said:

My wife is a GP and all of the above is spot on!

Thanks mate, so is mine...

Well luckily for you I guess that means you don't have to wait for weeks with the rest of the 'moany old entitled white men' for an appointment...

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