Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Thanks Hays. This is a NHS practice??. And this appointment is not an emergency appointment??

OTHERS please what are your experiencies.??

Just an ordinary practice. I never see any immigrants in the area. It is a sort of white ghetto as well.

Yep but I remember you commentating on your local A@E where you said it was like a cattle market full of immigrants with ALL THE FAMILY with them.

Im wondering if this is a regional problem with NHS GP appointments.

I think poster shortie said he had a short waiting time aswel at his GP.

Wonder if it gets worse the further north you move up from London or are some parts of london bad aswel??

Anyway off to watch Bouchards legs at the tennis.....amazing.

That is not my local A&E. In fact it was an outpatients dept in Hampstead. The catchment for the Hospital is huge. It is not even my local hospital.

Some parts of London are very bad. My mother in law is in a bad area for GPs.

Or bad GPs.

Let us consider the delayed being seen patients are a back log.

If the GPs worked an extra 2 hours a day, then they would be able to clear that back log within a short period of time.

If they were paid an extra £50 per patient to cleared the back log, some would work night and day.

Also, if they were more efficient of making diagnosis within the first couple of appointments, they could cut down on number of "return" or "follower up" appointments.

Also, there is in many practices a problem of continuity of treatment in GP and hospital medicine, which adds to the inefficiency and acceptance of ongoing responsibility for the patient.


The NHS has always been inefficient and that needs to be addressed, but it having the "NHS" it is part what makes a decent society.

Fred how long have you to wait?.

My problem is this, if I cant get an apointment for 10 working days 1.will my problem I have gone away or 2. will I have died?.

I hear some GPs are using the stats for cancelations due to getting better are lumping them with the offenders who dont turn up for an appointment even when the patient as phoned to cancel and say the illness as got better........surely that is wrong.

GF,

I think in the case of acute illness in a child, an appointment should be available the same day, or if judged "serious" within 2-3 hours during the day. (These can be evaluated by suitably trained staff with direct access if needed to "doctors".

If it is "routine" reviewing then that period can be extended.

Similar for adults, but judgement of urgency can be evaluated by medical trained staff.

There is no reason for delays.

But doctors have to have the courage, if a patient frequently bucks the system for personal convenience without respect of the practice organisation, to point it out to them.

Also, there is a role for doctors to educate patients and parents to recognise what is probably "trivial" illness and self treatable from the more serious.

Also, patients have to be educated to recognise that sometimes patience is a better treatment than a "pill" and the former is all that is needed.

=============

There is another problem leading to more consultations and that is the "bloody note" for everything society we are now attempting to live in.

=====

This is brief, and some of the details can cause the problems.

=========

Maggie Thatcher change Medicine for many practitioners from a vocation to a business.

Doctors not being "stupid" got fed up and started concentrating more on making a buck than the ethos of the profession.

(Loads of money.)

===

The stupid contract reform by Labour did not help the situation, also to a lesser degree "hours of work" which should have allowed for exemptions.

God knows what happens in the Scottish Isles. Must ask my niece's partner.

I can usually get a same day appointment at my surgery but this is Wales, land of free prescriptions and sheep! :o)

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/news/2014/02/public-not-noticing-impact-of-council-cuts/

Public ‘not noticing impact of council cuts’

By Richard Johnstone | 4 July 2014

Nearly two-thirds of people say that they have seen no real change in council services despite reductions in local authority funding as part of the coalition government’s deficit reduction plan, a poll has found.

According to the survey by insurers Zurich Municipal and Ipsos MORI, 63% of people said they had not noticed any difference to their council services, despite almost all local authorities introducing major changes, including reduction in some services, in response to budget pressures.

Bloody hell, are you blind Haystack?


Look at the state of the roads for example.

Kim,

Do feel at home there?

8-)

Hazy one.

Perhaps 47% are not dependent on the services being cut!

Kim cheers.

Seems to me its North of the Watford gap where we are suffering.

Fred I understand where you are coming from but would a young mother not be taking too much of a risk chancing on her young child?. Using her judgement for instance could be a massive risk.

Hays ...............open your eyes Council Services are appaling compared to 4 years back.

Had to get a blue badge for my mother.......4 years ago 2 days wait........now 2 months if your lucky.

Actually Fred, The field next to me has a herd of cows in it at the moment, not as accessible as sheep! :o)

Look out Crawshaws will be after the meat for their pies.

Lol!

Labour 6 point lead..........

UK - Opinium/Observer poll:

LAB 35%
CON 29%
UKIP 18%
LDEM 7%
GRN 5%

Osborne’s tax avoidance failure reveals the facts about Coalition policies 6 July 2014.

What bad luck for George Osborne to get two sums wrong in the same week!

The first sum was a simple times-table question; a school pupil asked him to multiply seven by eight and he couldn’t do it.

The second sum was more serious because it was a sum of money. Rather a lot of money. £1.9 billion, in fact.

The Boy had claimed that around £3 billion in extra tax had been recovered from “high net worth individuals” – tax avoiders – after investigations by HM Revenue and Customs.

Unfortunately, errors in the way HMRC’s performance targets were set meant that these improvements were… well, “overstated” is how the Huffington Post described them.

This meant that, when HMRC said it exceeded its target for tax compliance in 2010-11 by £1.9 billion, in fact it had only just hit its target. The following year, its claim to have exceeded targets by £2 billion was out by the same amount; in fact it had made gains of just £100 million.

There is around £21 trillion in unclaimed, avoided tax sitting in ‘haven’ bank accounts around the world – many of them British territories - and Osborne has managed to collect just £100 million.

Meanwhile unemployed and low-paid working citizens – who have no income apart from state benefits, due to the systematic destruction of the UK’s industrial base by neoliberal politicians who were intent on increasing insecurity among the lower classes – are being starved to death.

Osborne has only himself to blame. When the Coalition government came into office, the Tories insisted that they didn’t need anything like as many public-sector workers as were then on the books – and started laying people off wholesale.

Now the DWP has a claimant assessment backlog of 700,000 for ESA alone (compared with less than 30,000 in May 2010) and the government’s flagship Universal Credit project is hopelessly bogged down, to quote just two examples of the remaining public servants being unable to do their jobs.

Meanwhile, outsourcing of government jobs to private companies has created a disaster: The National Health Service in England is slowly falling over the cliff, with privateers taking so much in profit that the service will go £2 billion into debt next year while waiting times at Accident and Emergency departments continue to increase out-of-control (no matter what lies David Cameron dribbles in Prime Minister’s Questions); a £116 million IT programme arranged with French firm Steria to run staffing, procurement and payroll services for civil servants was scrapped at a cost of £56 million – and then Steria was re-hired to outsource British jobs to India, Poland and Morocco, again at UK taxpayers’ expense.

Does anyone remember the fiasco when G4S was hired to run security at the London Olympics, failed to meet requirements, and the Army had to be called in at the last minute?

Atos and the DWP, anybody?

Andy Hamilton commented on this phenomenon during this week’s News Quiz on BBC Radio 4: “For decades, we have watched governments hand over the utilities and services to companies like G4S and Serco and we have watched as they basically ruined them.

“And then once they’ve ruined them, they get given some more to ruin until they’re running all sorts of services; they’re now huge!

“I still hanker after the good old days when G4S was just Group 4, and its core business was letting prisoners escape from vans.”

Some of us still hanker after the good old days when George Osborne was just a department store employee, and his core business was folding towels.