The Surgery's Gone Down the Plughole

Eloethan. Do you mean that her name was not on their database?
Or that her treatment was not on their database?

Neither her name, nor her treatment.

I see that the practice has got a shiny new website under the Provide banner, I clicked on the 'News' tab and it said there isn't any....

The practice had two branches, mine in town, and another in a nearby village. The letter I had said that the town site was taken by Provide, and the village was going to another local practice, but the website says the new manager controls both sites. The 'Contact Us' page only lists one site.

The staff list contains just one GP for both sites, and they appear to have replaced both the nurses with new ones.

I've just discovered that the practice was all over the media last year in a minor scandal about trying to gag patients from complaining publicly.

Claims to be a "social enterprise" but wonder how much the board members get paid... I'm afraid the Coalition opened the door for this kind of outsourcing without it being included in any manifesto and after promises of no manjor NHS reorganisations. The days when people can expect to have a "family doctor" are fast disappearing. Turn up and see a locum will be more the thing.
NHS England is due for £14 billion cuts in the very near future. That is £22 billion so called "efficiency savings" minus the £8billion that the PM kindly promised to give the NHS.
And people voted for this.
Predict that GN, in 3-4 years time, will be swamped with stories about poor care and disappeared services.
We can expect more staff to leave and go to places like Australia, where they will be welcomed.

Isn't it more than that,JessM?
The £8 billion has already been taken off the £30 billion black hole to leave £22 billion.

Eloethan over 20,000 operations cancelled in the first three months of this year, and your mum hasn't even got that far yet.
Essex sounds like it's in real trouble, with the trust being taken over.

"NHS regulators are to push through major changes to how hospitals and GP services are run in whole parts of England where services have been beset by major problems for years.

The unprecedented move will see three key national NHS bodies intervene to dictate how all local services tackle longstanding problems such as understaffing, financial trouble and poor care.

The new “success regime” will be applied first to three areas of England – Essex, North Cumbria and North, East and West Devon – where previous efforts have failed to produce improvements."

From a Guardian article. Does that mean that the 2012 NHS system has been found not to work, because doctors do not want to be accountants?
I notice they have also stopped the NICE review on nursing levels, which Francis recommended after the Mid Staffs report, and scrapped two waiting time targets.

We must be very lucky here with our surgery. I rang at 10ish yesterday morning and asked to see my doctor. There were no appointments but he tacked me on the end of his list. Was seen at 12.

Mind you, the jollop he gave me is doing fuck-all, but that's another story.

Blimey, that's taken me back a good few years, jingl! My granddad used to refer to all medicines as 'jollop'.

Hope you feel better soon

I am to have a telephone consultation with my doctor on Tuesday afternoon. I didn't object, because I want to discuss the letter a consultant has sent to him and copied to me. There is a test that he has to order but doesn't have to see me for that.

What I object to is that often you cannot get to see your GP face to face until you have had a telephone consultation a week later. That puts the face to face consultation that your GP has said you need even further back. In the meantime, you need a repeat prescription and your prescription says you cannot have any more tablets until you have seen your GP! I have thought a couple of times that I cannot be bothered with all this and wondered what would happen if I just stopped taking the tablets.

Really durhamjen re the 22 bn? Wow. Either way it is a huge amount and cannot be achieved without significant staff and service cuts.

Yes, Jess. The difference is £30 billion, but they are kindly giving back £8 billion, providing the NHS makes £22 billion in efficiency savings. So the £8 billion is not even guaranteed. But, as you say, they are still big figures.

Just been reading Pulse.
This is why it's difficult to see a GP.

www.pulsetoday.co.uk/your-practice/battling-burnout/it-was-like-leaving-an-abusive-relationship/20010167.article

The comments show he's not the only one.
Also just read that Scotland is going towards fully salaried GPs again. I wonder how that will work out.
Who pays locums, as many in England appear to prefer locum status?

Figures out today say that only 80% of places on GP courses have been filled. The government should be worried that they have made the idea of becoming a GP so unattractive despite the salaries.

They do indeed need tobe concerned.

www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/05/gp-surgery-closures-london-crisis-refugee-patients

For those Londoners who do not read the Guardian.

I'm surprised that you have to wait a week for a telephone consultation durhamjen We can always speak to one the same day and, if he thinks it's serious, we will be squeezed in among the appointments. (DH and I once spent half an hour hidden in a treatment room so as not to annoy the people who were already waiting!)

Difference between Berkshire and Durham, Deedaa?

Nearly missed a telephone consultation on Thursday because the GP rang from her mobile instead of the surgery phone!

Has anyone else received a questionnaire from NHS England to complete? It is supposed to improve GP and dental services in our area. If I put crosses in the boxes it will look as though all is well but it isn't.
There is no way of saying how we have to start phoning at 8.00 am if we want an appointment and often have to try over 30 times before we get through and then wait while we are told how many people are ahead of us.
I remember feeling really ill and trying to get an appointment. In the end I gave up and went to bed. Fortunately I lived to tell the tale!
The GPs and nurses are lovely if we manage to get an appointment but I think you have to be fit to go through the torment of actually getting one.
I am not sure what is going on about cataract operations locally. It seems as though an American company are doing the operations at a local hospital and the service is fantastic. Two of our neighbours have had operations within days of their optician saying they needed one. Our next door neighbour came to our house the other evening. He had seen his optician that morning and had a phone call a few hours later asking him to go to the hospital next morning so he needed a lift!

www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/06/terminally-ill-benefit-claimants-asked-when-they-expect-to-die-mp-says

Just read this. This is not supposed to happen. It's a sick society that asks this.

Just had another letter.

After several paragraphs of PR-speak, the news is that the NHS have sold the building. It says they're in negotiations with the new owner, so perhaps they're wanting to rent it back until the temporary contract with Provide runs out next June, and then close it down.

These private companies are all over England these days and I read articles in Private Eye all the time about them.

They operate on multiple sites grouped in 'hubs' which is exactly what the government originally wanted GP practices to do on a large scale to save money. That never happened mainly because it was impractical in most areas, so the next best thing was more private sector involvement.

The chances of patients seeing the same doctor are slim because doctors get sent where the need is greatest. The companies are often only meeting the minimum terms of their contract in the first place to make as much profit as possible, so it's easy for them to drop below that minimum standard when staff leave. They often have a high turnover of staff because of the way staff are treated. This includes GPs, so new GPs are very common.

When a provider is not delivering the agreed level of service, it takes ages to deal with this. Time is given to rectify and review the problem and often the end result is the company cannot provide the service it contracted to provide and moves on. This is common with any private sector contract when it is not working well, not just in the NHS. Monitoring private sector contractors must be costing us a fortune.

The NHS is selling off buildings to rent them back to the private sector, which generates income, but at the cost of an asset.

Forget about continuity of care and the NHS is definitely being privatised through the back door. Time and time again we see examples of things going wrong and it costs money to put things right. In the meantime patients and their families, and the tax payer loses out, whilst someone makes money. In all seriousness I would like to read about where privatisation of core in the NHS is working well and has been for a while.

Yes it is a crazy bill that has was pushed heavily by Lord Saatchi in the Lords last year. A quacks charter. By the end of its previous life there were so many amendments it was disappearing up its own backside.
Trouble is that there are not enough MPs with any scientific education, not in any of the parties.
This is another depressing piece of legislation in a depressing few months during which all kinds of ill thought out and ideologically driven bills are being pushed through before there are any by elections to reduce the tory majority.
Crumb of comfort is that i don't think it will apply to Wales.

No, but Wales has problems too; some of the funding has been removed for services at the GP surgery we attend, one of which is a service I use regularly.
Orthopaedic procedures are just a vain hope for some date months or years in the future - go private was the advice
Cataract patients were sent to a facility over the border in England - a choice of three hospitals offered to a friend of ours fairly quickly (otherwise wait for ever in Wales and perhaps lose your sight)
Heart patients have been sent to a private hospital in Bristol funded by the Welsh NHS - they got excellent treatment there but were lacking one piece of equipment which was needed on rare occasions for just one or two patients, and I believe that the Bristol NHS hospital was refusing to take these urgent rare cases.

At the moment I'm reading a lot about these kinds of things happening, but touch wood I have not experienced any of them or heard of them happening to family and friends in my part of England.

I do know that in my Mum's part of Scotland most consultant services were centralised in a larger hospital some time ago and the arrangement was consultants would travel to the smaller hospitals to see patients on a regular basis. Now though many of the consultants have have stopped doing this and their patients have to travel to the larger hospital. It's a 150 mile round trip from my Mum's town and some patients are collected and dropped off by a mini bus service which can mean a very long day if there's several patients involved.