More than 28 million people booked appointments with their GP in March making it one of the busiest months ever, and practices expect to remain this busy for many months to come due to the patient backlog caused by lockdowns. The MailOnline has the story.
The figure was five million more than in February – a sudden spike of 20%.
And doctors say they no longer see highs and lows in patient flows throughout the year, and that instead it is like they’re constantly in crisis.
Dr Dean Eggitt, a GP in Doncaster in South Yorkshire, told the broadcaster: “The ability to catch up has gone. That was before Covid. Then Covid hit and then it’s just peak, peak, peak, peak all the time.”
During the height of the coronavirus pandemic people avoided the NHS – having been advised to except in emergencies during the first wave – and officials fear that many have developed serious illnesses like cancers and not been checked.
The number of people dying at home surged to above average levels while non-Covid hospital deaths were less common, suggesting people were missing out on end-of-life medical care.
A&E visits plummeted while the virus was circulating but they have surged again recently with the “worried well” returning to hospital emergency departments.
Dr Eggitt told the BBC: “We have almost a tsunami of patients coming to us. It feels like the river has flooded the banks.
“I see no end of it stopping. It just keeps coming and coming and coming in this one massive endless wave of patients.”
A Health Foundation analysis of NHS data found that there were around 31 million fewer GP practice appointments between April 2020 and March 2021 than in the previous year – 279 million compared to 310 million.
This was likely not a result of fewer people being ill but of fewer visiting their family doctor, meaning millions may have gone without care they usually would have had.
As a result, the patients now turning up to appointments are sicker than they would have been if they had seen a doctor six months ago.
Worth reading in full.
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Save the NHS, amirite?
You mean Our NHS surely
They can fuck off
When push came to shove they abandoned us whilst still picking up their pay cheques
They left tens of thousands to painful needless deaths
Now they are feeling sorry for themselves
Fuck them. Sack the lot
nicely put
It has always been idiotic to put the NHS on a pedestal. It needs drastic improvement but politically no one dare.
Prevention better than cure has never been their priority.
Bravo to those intelligent souls who prevented the NHS from being overwhelmed
As very occasional end user of GP services, I have seen the service delivered to me by GPs deteriorating over a period of ten years or more. Full-time experienced GPs replaced by part-time, job-sharing, junior GPs. Difficult to ever see the same GP twice. Increasingly difficult to get an appointment. Surly and bad-tempered receptionists. IT and phone services mainly designed to keep people away from GPs rather than helping people contact them. Increasing difficulty with prescriptions (mainly caused by non-working IT linking the surgery to pharmacists).
COVID has no doubt exacerbated the situation, but it has been a LONG time since the GP service was acceptable for end users, at least where I live.
GPs are pretty well-paid, courtesy of the Blair government, and the surgery they work in seems a nice environment, so I don’t think funding is the issue.
Perhaps it’s the GPs which are the issue.
You think you’ve got problems? Our town’s medical centre has has NO GP for the last three years. Nine. Not one. All they needed to do when SAGE struck was bolt the door. No doctors, no patients, nothing.Ultimate protection of the NHS.
Nine?
probably NONE – ‘o’ and ‘i’ next to each other on keyboard.
Absolutely spot on. Our local GP’s are a disgrace – lazy and money grubbing and many simply not up to the job.
And of course now invisible.
There;s a LOT of it about. Our once brilliant surgery was destroyed years ago
I thought Doctors were supposed to be reasonably intelligent people. What did they think was going to happen? Perhaps they were hoping all the non Covid people with cancer, heart disease etc would all be dead before they actually had to see any of them, and of course having to deal with sick people when you can get fifteen pounds per head from the Government from every person you stick the “vaccine” into certainly does interfere with the chances of buying a second mercedes.
In my view the GP services should be opened up to the likes of Tesco etc such that these well paid, part time , life style Doctors get the royal order of the rocket up their back passages
How can they be “reasonably intelligent people” when they tell people that they are overweight, their BP is a tad “high” – and how scientifically is that measured, just one measure or a series over a period of time, not at all due to white coat fever surely – and that their cholesterol measure of LDL/HDL ( which is not ….cholesterol) is “high” ..”So Mr Patient I have to take your height and weight and put all these metrics especially the gold standard BMI testing into a spreadsheet provided by the National Institute for Clinical Excrement so I can prescribe Statins to reduce your health threateningly high measures” What they don’t say is that they will not use their clinical judgment (??!!) to assess whether you are a fit person ( such as walking/cycling/yoga/aerobic exercise taken regularly etc) with large bone structure or muscle, or that they get paid to put people on these drugs, that there is no ideal level of cholesterol, that Statins are harmful to every cell in your body, that people with allegedly high levels of cholesterol survive heart attacks better than those with “lower levels” and that the NICE instruction to slash the “idle” BP… Read more »
I must be very fortunate where I live. My GP practice has been superb at supporting me through my Covid-19 infection & secondary pneumonia, putting in place a plan to keep me at home, phoning up to check how I was doing & I have been able to get an appointment on the day I needed one. Plus the receptionists are human!
I know that this is completely unrepresentative of a vast number of GP practices, as my patients used to regularly attest.
Likewise – I have an excellent caring GP that has fought to keep his surgery from being merged with all the others locally and provides an real patient service to everyone if he can and although it’s been almost all on the phone I’ve had blood tests when needed and follow up. But I’ve been in the area for some 40 years and it’s been very stable in terms of GP provision. Can’t imagine what it must be like in big city clinics with constantly shifting populations and part time Drs.
I think the rage should be directly at those who speak for the GPs, the clergy, the teaching union chiefs to think of a few – and for us, the people. No-one but no-one stood up to be counted – we’ve all been impoverished and diminished on every level. Extra-ordinary and unforgiveable.
‘Your patients’ is the key phrase. As a doctor, you will be treated completely differently from the rest of us
Not a medic, a speech & language therapist. And no, I get no special treatment. Just that the GPs have been proactive in utilising online appointment booking, telephone triage & same day face to face appointment for those who clinically need one.
How does their Hippocratic oath stake up against what they have been doing for the past year? Shouldn’t most of them be struck off for wilful neglect of their patients by refusing to physically examine people?
Patient backlog caused by lockdowns, and patients additional needs caused by lockdowns. Mental, physical, emotional health all taking a battering. Less activity, poorer diet, no social contact, smoking, alcohol, stress, removed support systems, later access to help, remote consultations missing symptoms, removal of treatment (physio in person) etc etc etc and that’s just me.
There is no health care in this country that any one can depend on.
Take responsibility for your own health (preventative health). When you are in an accident or need cancer care it will be like a lottery – you might win or not. Most don’t
The jab will help though – less patients to see!
Eventually. First they get a few side effects then come the next bout of winter respiratory diseases they’ll be dropping like flies.
Actually, I hope not and my worst fears are wrong but I don’t want those vaccines for a few years and only then if we retain freedom and I can trust what I’m told again. Right now I wouldn’t believe anything I hear on MSM, big tech, the NHS or the government.
Exactly: a shot.
The booster will doubtless be delivered in the back of the neck.
Problem is they would be claiming it’s backlog even if it was vaccine side effects so we’ll never really know.
One wonders how those people who live in countries not blessed with an NHS are managing, like France, Switzerland Germany Austria Holland, Sweden. What’s that you say? Their systems are seeing people as normal and they don’t have a huge backlog of delayed potentially lifesaving operations and screening. Is that because their systems don’t allow the GP to be a blocking gatekeeper? Is that because they have 1st world health care and not a 2nd world, 3rd rate system that is perennially short of cash, Quote below: “It was disheartening, if predictable, for Dr Rosie Shaw of the Doctors’ Association to excuse the vexatious non-availability of some family doctors over the past year, blaming it instead on ‘chronic underfunding’ of the Health Service. Not a bit of it. Over the past thirty years the NHS budget has doubled, doubled and then doubled again from £30 billion to £140 billion pounds a year with a substantial increase in the number of registered family doctors from 34,000 to 47,000. To be sure more might be working part time but then they can afford to since the generous 50 per cent pay rise back in 2004 that increased their average income in excess… Read more »
I live in Belgium. One big difference between the system there and here in the U.K. – if my doctor doesn’t see patients he doesn’t get paid! I rarely see the doctor but I am able to choose freely who I see and have chosen a GP who shares my philosophy on health. I went for an annual check last January. I spent an hour there with no mask. Admittedly I spent more than my insurance covers but it was worth it for the ability to have a relaxed, in-depth consultation.
I believe everyone should have access to medical care despite their income but as far as I can see the NHS ends up pleasing and suiting no-one.
Boo fucking hoo. Maybe they should try seeing what it’s like being a patient trying to get an appointment over the last 14 months. A real appointment of the face-to-face variety.
To gain a place in medical school in the West is to win the middle-class technocracy sweepstakes. Surely these smart people could have raised this as an issue, loudly, when they were told to pause their normal pace of work for fifteen months.
And we are watching GP’s leave their practices, one by one.
A friend, whose wife is a GP, says that she said the following, in response to my (tactfully expressed) question on this subject: “There are, says L, good reasons to continue with a lot of remote consultations. In no particular order: Patient benefit – avoids patients, many of whom are ill with other things, mixing and spreading in waiting rooms. No deaths does not mean no Covid, even in areas of low prevalence. [me: but if covid means no deaths, why be sooooo afraid of it?] Remote consultations are quick and effective for lots of conditions. Roots out the ‘worried well’ who use up vast amounts of GP time. If you need to be seen face to face you will be seen more promptly after a remote consultation than was the case before [me: but for heaven’s sake, surely a remote consultation will miss symptoms that would be picked up face-to-face – no?]. GPs are seeing loads of patients, through multiple channels, and directing them to the appropriate person more promptly than would normally by the case. They are definitely NOT shirking work and picking an easy option. [Me: I don’t get it – “shirking” may be too emotive a… Read more »
Wouldn’t have anything to do with the c.800,000 vaccine side effects reported….
I’m afraid the GPs get no sympathy from me. Zilch.
Sometimes it isn’t their fault, it’s the Practice Manager/PCT/CCG which dictates what the GPs may or may not do. Receptionists are in there too acting as gatekeepers to the gatekeepers.