PPG & NHS

[bunn]

 I attended the Patients Participation Group at my local NHS practice a couple of months ago. The idea of these is to get a patients-eye perspective on the practice, and also provide an avenue for the practice to communicate with the patients while they aren't actively being ill.

This practice, it is fair to say, has a dire reputation. Just the mention of it gets people tutting gloomily.

Being short of doctors, it resorted to the system of requiring people who wish for an appointment with a GP to phone at 8am each day. resulting in a mad frenzy that maxes out the phone system. By 8:20, all the appointments for the day have gone. There's no way to book ahead, and no other way to contact a doctor or to make a non-urgent appointment.

It doesn't matter how many complicated ways you find to slice the cake, if the main problem is that there is nothing like enough cake. The doctor present feels that paid-for GP's appointments lie ahead and are only a matter of time.

Though, I am not sure if that will actually help much in this case, since the major problem here seems to be less lack of money than remoteness, and reluctance of medical staff with many jobs to choose from, to isolate themselves in obscure Western lands, and particularly, to go to work for practices with appalling reputations. This is also a very white area, and the doctor who spoke to us was fairly up-front about racism being an issue for many potential recruits, which is a particularly awful thing to hear.

The social media complaints have become something of a self-fulfilling prophesy: the more people complain in public, the more potential recruits are deterred from choosing to work there.

There's also the problem that unlike England, NHS Wales has not invested in electronic prescription system, and therefore, all doctors are stuck on a treadmill of endless manual prescription signing. I must say that one surprised me, and I darkly suspect that the thorny problem of providing everything in English and Welsh is an issue there. Which I support, but possibly not to the point where people are actually dying as a result.

Anyway. There was a Senedd member present who had come out from Cardiff for the meeting, so I'm hoping he's going to raise that with whoever it is can actually change things.

I am not sure that there's much I can do as an untrained volunteer to contribute to anything, but armed with this info, I have managed to help calm a major Angry On FAceboOK incident, which I think is the kind of help they wanted from the group.

Things are better here than at a neighbouring practice, where the last doctor retired a few months back and now the practice is probably going to close. I'm not sure what happens then. I really hope it doesn't involve all the patients being allocated to the practices around.

The good news is that they have actually managed to recruit one extra doctor, who will have started work by now. They've also given their receptionists more training, which I guess allows them to shuffle the deckchairs on the Titanic faster and with more assurance.

Comments

[sally_maria]

It sounds very much like the problems I've read about in optometry, where getting optoms to work in the more distant and rural parts of the UK is a problem. (And how white those areas are doesn't help...)

I guess the only positive to paid-for appointments might be being able to pay higher salaries, which may encourage professionals to move away from the big cities, but I agree it's hardly a preferable solution.

[bunn]

Yes, there are clearly a lot of people who are attracted to the cities. I don't get it myself, but clearly it's a thing. I'm not quite sure why people from the rural areas are no longer getting these qualifications. Something about the cost of housing in the country, so that fewer children are brought up there, maybe?

[sally_maria]

Could be. I also wonder whether people who grow up in rural areas and want to carry on living there don't think of going into medical careers - as not a specifically countryside thing - but it really is hard to know.