It’s OK for you because you just turn the boats around and have nothing to do with them! We have had 17,000 arrive on our shores this YEAR alone. They all receive health and dental care for free. meantime those of us cannot get to see a GP for weeks, hospital waiting lists are around 2 years and you cannot register with a NHS dentist as their lists are closed.
We have worked and paid our National Insurance all our working lives and we are very poorly treated.
Of course it’s relevant to a discussion about Rishi Sunak trying to get £10 back for missed appointments. It’s all about the NHS and we are forking out millions on people who come here to get free treatment on the NHS. I wasn’t actually talking about the boat people - I was talking about health tourists who go back home after their treatment and don’t pay a penny. The boat people we are stuck with.
When I had an infected hand a couple of years back the dr took off the dressing and told me to go to the nurse to get it redressed .The nurse un graciously said she was attending to me in her tea break .
As she was seriously overweight she could have done without the tea and biccies but best to keep quiet in certain circumstances.
I really think the NHS needs tor get it’s own act together before it starts shifting any culpability onto the patient.
I’m not even going to get into the tricky subject of negligence claims. My own family had one for a hospital error which turned my stepfather into a vegetable. It was a right hospital cockup and ended up in court.
A £10 fine is not going to provide a better health service, ,quite the opposite. Doubtless there will have to be a league of secretaries and receptionists sitting wading through fines to be sent off through the post.
It is, put bluntly, a stupid idea. There’s already a mountain of wastage and money been frittered away.
My own opinion of local GPs has plummeted , mainly due to covid, and the fact that they, of all people, seem to be reluctant to going back to the pre-covid days and offer regular appointments or even walk-in services.
I can remember, vaguely, seeing a doctor’s face back in 2019.
They are paid out of a practice budget and how that practice manages it’s staff is irrelevant to the way that contract funding is calculated and paid to the practice itself. The notional cost of an appointment is a finger in the air. A missed appointment will be a marginal cost, perhaps even a saving as practices routinely overbook on the premise that several patients will cancel/not turn up. It’s why patients have to wait so long when they do duly arrive. Smoke and mirrors Ripple.
Agreed it’s a total waste of money as it isn’t just the cost of chasing payment, it’s a vast cost of introducing payment systems at eye-watering digital infrastructure contracts. Someone is out to make money and is pushing for this. Doubtless some digi multinational looking to cream off the taxpayer. On the hoof or under the radar creaming?
absolutely ridiculous that GPs are unable to change a simple dressing. I’ve come across this myself and it’s as though they see it as beneath them. You know you have a good doctor if they do it themselves without looking sniffy about it or their hands shaking with anxiety (which I have seen)
I would have done it myself has I had the necessary stuff it only took a few minutes .
I suppose the GP thought that was why they had a nurse they don’t seem to have medical supplies in their consulting rooms.
I quite agree there’s a lot not to like at the moment with the NHS
However that doesn’t address Richie Sunak promise to introduce fines for lost appointments.
A £10 fine will probably cost the NHS (us the public £50 ) to issue the thing!
However I strongly believe people have to be held responsible for their actions or in this case inaction.
I’ve said about as much as I want to say on a £10 fine .
Time for a coffee
I am not disagreeing with you Annie, but I have to say that the nurses at my doctors are considerably better than the Docs when it comes to dressing wounds! I suppose practice makes perfect!
Of course but some patients can’t do it themselves. It really depends on the patient and the location of a wound. Basic care that can make so much difference to healing and save money for the NHS. Save money if people don’t end up with an infection or poor healing, so much is at stake in getting basic dressings right. I find it astonishing that some GPs are so poorly trained on this basic life saving treatment. Our poor mum ended up on antibiotics because of poor dressing management by a GP who didn’t know when stitches should come out. He tried to take them out (struggling) and left a knot in the wound which then became infected.
The skin between my small toe & the next one split, so there was no chance of dressing it myself . As a diabetic it needed to stay clean so I was invited to see one of the nurses at my surgery.
She cleaned & dressed it and asked me ro return in a week, but if it became more painful to call the surgery immediately. Thanks to her knowledge it was clean & healed by the end of the week .
Weeks later a nurse saw me 3 times to safely remove a painful splinter from my finger & she was excellent too. I wrote to the Practice manager to applaud the help from their nurses & was advised that, if the nurse felt it needed anti biotics she would ask a doctor of he could prescribe them. The system works well, provided they have the right number of trained nurses & probably saves doctors wasting time on jobs they don’t do as well .
An elderly lady near us had skin cancer on top of her head. She went to hospital and had surgery and a skin graft and they put a huge dressing on it. It was a big wound about 3” square. She was told to see her GP practice the following week.
She told the nurse it still felt tender and she was being very careful not to knock it. The nurse just said “let’s have a look then” and ripped the dressing off and pulled all the skin graft off as well! She was left with a red raw wound and had to go back to hospital to get another skin graft done.
Surely she should have had to go back to the hospital, Rather than her GP or his nurse!
The hospital doctor is responsible for checking that the wound is healing ok. I would have complained ro the hospital & my GP, but I think it is unfair to ask a nurse who had no knowledge of what had been done at the hospital.
No they tend to discharge back to community/ GP care with anything like that these days Twink. This is how our mum ended up with an eye infection because the stitches were left to the GP and nurse to remove. The GP left a stitch knot inside the healing wound which then swelled up into a massive blood bubble. This burst all over the floor. Thank goodness that there was an urgent care centre still around then. All between Christmas and New year so was impossible to make a further appointment.
