After Hours Visits

There is a report that the numbers of parents taking their children directly to hospital A&E, when they have ailments such a fevers, has risen sharply. The government is said to be working on an after hours strategy. This is all absurd. GPs used to be available to their patients 24/7. As a consequence of the craven and befuddled thinking which afflicts politicians and state bureaucrats when dealing with doctors, changes were made so that medical hours were made more like office hours, where at a given point people knock off and go home.

Medicine is not like that. It is not that sort of vocation. It is not that sort of responsibility. GPs have to provide a round the clock service as the first line of support for their patients, for whose healthcare they are quite astonishingly well paid. This does not mean that every GP has to be on duty round the clock. There are very few single doctor practices nowadays for whom special arrangements would have to be made. Most practices have two or mostly several doctors. My own local GP surgery, a rural practice, has seven. It is easy to organise an after hours rota. GPs should be ordered to do this. The present set up is rotten. It is expensive, strains the resources of A&E and may even cost lives.

We do not need a strategy. Every fool knows what is needed. Just get on and do it.