I’m pretty sure that our Practice is run, financially, by the group of Doctors. (Practice Directors).
So, if the money is going to the practice, it would be going to them?
It is my understanding that GP practices are now run as businesses. The one here has many health centres covering a lot of the county. In total it has 200,000 patients. I believe the NHS pays £155.46 (2019/20) per patient per year for patients on their books. Working the figures out this is £31,092,000 a year – a ‘nice little earner’ as Del Boy would say. Especially as some patients never see their GP in years and all necessary treatments, investigations etc. are paid by the CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group) to which GPs belong.
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Yes but it’s going into a business and they will need to manage the costs of the practice just like any other small business. Tariffs have to cover all sorts of overheads and unsocial hours. Plus they have to keep their practice going. Who on earth would want to be a GP? It’s such a difficult job.
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Ours only do a three day week
Can you imagine the administrative burden? Probably one of the most bureaucratic services to provide. No wonder big companies are taking over swathes of practices and GPs are retiring early.
Yes, but it’s no different to running any business. There are managers and accountants as with all businesses and not many have the backing of an enormous organisation, such as the NHS, when it comes to investigations and procedures. Nowadays I understand the private sector provides services to these GPs as well as having the NHS doing the same. Two people I know had been waiting for procedures under the NHS, one for a hip replacement the other for a cataract procedure, they both had this done at private hospitals, possibly even using the same surgeon as the NHS uses.
But since when should doctors be businessmen/women?
I’m not sure I follow ref the rest of your post ref the private sector. The NHS provides hip operations and cataracts not GPs.
If a GP makes a mistake they can be taken to court. May be different in a hospital setting. People are unhappy now but when GPs are replaced with bots what then?
Doctors are not exactly sole traders though are they, managers and others are part of the health centre where I go, which is no different to a lot of companies that are run by accountants.
I am not qualified to know exactly how GPs work but it was my understanding that they could ‘buy-in’ services from the private sector. Possibly GPs have a lot of ‘sway’ when it comes to their patients getting procedures they know are required. The one person I mentioned who was due to have cataract procedures was advised by the NHS hospital to contact his GP rather than keep chasing them. Within weeks the procedure had been carried out at a private hospital, the wait until then had been since the start of the covid pandemic.
I would have thought that private hospitals would have regulations by which to abide, failure to do so would render them liable to legal procedures the same as any other health organisation, GPs included.
We already have surgeons using what are advanced technology devices, as for ‘bots’ replacing GPs, other than what I have seen on various TV programmes I don’t know much more. One day though with what’s happening with AI (artificial intelligence) that will be how things are done.
GPs have always been “gatekeepers” hence the advice your friend was given. Lansley created the health and social care act to make it possible for GPs to commission services but in reality they have just carried on being doctors. I remember my (since retired) GP talking to me about this over ten years ago, how he was bemused by the graphs and charts they were showing him at some corporate event. He was totally disinterested in that side of things, but he was pretty good at curing people.
When I was a child you would go to the GP and sit and wait to be seen. The GP would then talk a bit, possibly examine you, possibly not and then write a prescription. It was more of a social occasion for my mum to gossip with the GPs wife who was also the receptionist. The GP would then write a prescription for some medication usually antibiotics and he would sit there chain smoking during the whole process. If people think that the way things are now are somehow easier for GPs and worse for patients then I must be living on a different planet.
In my opinion, a GP is now a Help Desk member. By that I mean that he/she gives a patient a few minutes, to describe the issue, then gets on his/her PC and looks for similars.
After that, he/she will escalate the patient, or write a prescription.
OK, so far, except that some serious issues are not being found, because they are not being “seen”, and the telephone/ on line patient support is very hard to circumnavigate.
So, we then add in a massive need for vaccinations to take place, so what do we do?
We shift the Doctor off all of the things I mentioned earlier, and pay him lots of gold to do the jabs - without thinking about the gold that might be saved because the Doc is not doing the first set of tasks, any more.
Nor do we have a plan to catch the patients up who were waiting in the first set of queues!
Now, let’s just mention your last sentence “If people think that the way things are now are somehow easier for GPs and worse for patients then I must live on a different planet”
My only answer to that is that patients have never, in my experience, had it so bad as they do now.
What’s it like on Venus?
@AnnieS, Why do we keep up the pretence of having
a NHS ??
Let’s admit that the NHS has been privatising for decades now !!
With private interests feeding on the huge pool of guaranteed
public money that is available to them !
Donkeyman! 
Indeed they are ‘gatekeepers’. When I elected to go private (on instructions from Marge!), to avoid a minimum 6 months waiting time to be seen on the NHS, I had to ask the GP for a referral letter before I could arrange an appointment with a private consultant.
I also remember the days when you could just walk in to the doctor’s surgery and wait to be seen. Things have definitely changed, though I suppose there are more of us now and fewer of them!
It’s free at the point of use which is the point. I wonder how many lives Bevan’s vision has saved compared with what the UK had before.
As for public money feeding private interests that is a far wider discussion and not just related to the NHS. Schools, local authorities, etc it’s all the same for the last two or three decades.
I think at some point they must have changed the contract and allowed them to take on more patients to their list. Because it was about 15 or more years ago or more that my favourite GP who still allowed the sit and wait appointments retired in disgust at some changes. They then moved us to the most awful practice and it took a lot of work to register with a more decent one, who then also retired.
The way it’s going we will no longer be able to see a named gp. I have been referred to physio for a shoulder problem and had to go through half an hour of questions with a bot app on the phone to determine what was wrong with me! How many people who are much older than me and feeling unwell can focus on something like that? So like I said we may moan about them now but we will moan more at what is coming next. Hologram GPs?
I agree with both, which I think I may have mentioned earlier.
There are things which cannot be diagnosed over the telephone and need physical contact.
Routine Covid jabs, like flu jabs, can be done by nurses, pharmacists and nursing assistants, even trained monkeys, as long as a doctor is present to support a number of them in case of such things as (the rare) adverse reactions.
They do need thorough training though because isn’t there a danger it can go into the wrong part of an arm? I think there was a long thread about this on the “other side”. I think you have to be clinically qualified rather than just a St John’s ambulance volunteer.
We haven’t been able to see a named GP for many years. We are patients within a GP practice and, although we could ask to see a specific GP there is no telling how long we’d have to wait.
In practice, we just book in to see the first one available - on a telephone consultation of course!
I had to change an appointment recently because there is a locum they booked me to who has watched too many episodes of doc Martin. I just had to wait a bit longer but worth it. You can choose who you see on our practice website just weeks to wait!
Not really. There is a large muscle (the Deltoid) on the outside of the upper arm in which there are no major blood vessels or nerves. I think it would take a two-minute ‘course’ to point out where this is, and the needle is of the optimum length to insert to the correct depth.
OK, I joked about the trained monkey, but a nurse, a pharmacist, a nursing assistant (that’s who has given mine) or indeed a St John’s Ambulance volunteer could do it.
I’m not sure what you mean by that, but it does sound funny!