You know me. Never one to complain about the government and the damage they have inflicted on our NHS and all that, but fuck it: I’m going off on one today about the NHS.
Having sought advice from our local health centre about my ongoing (my loyal reader yawns – “here we go again”) mental health, after just the two weeks they replied by text. In a further three weeks, a clinician would contact me. Hmm. A clinician. That means it might be a doctor but, I suspect, more likely it will be a healthcare assistant or a nurse practitioner. Either way, I won’t have a choice, which brings me to the results of the GP survey (above).
The government has made the decision that patients can’t see GPs. This has happened because funding, £/patient, has been cut by 20% (a fifth) in real terms since 2016. It is true that the government has funded other roles, but not GPs. And never forget that we were promised 6000 more GPs. Under the Conservatives, there are 2000 less. The public certainly gets this. The survey says so.
In 2018, 53.5% of us said we had a “preferred GP”. I certainly did. When you’re a mental case, like me, the last thing you want is to have to explain your history to yet another GP who knows nothing about you. That figure has declined to 41.5%. I can only speak for me but I have not seen a GP at our local health centre in many years, certainly not since before Covid. I only recognise the name of one of the GPs and the only time I saw him was when I was visiting a friend in a care home.
Clearly, the second question, “How often did patients see their preferred GP?”, doesn’t apply to me but even without me, and dare I suggest a few million other folk, 64.6% either rarely see their preferred GP or never do. This can’t be good for us all, can it?
Rishi Sunak, yes that little shit again, announced that the NHS was receiving ‘record funding”. Given that the whole organisation is creaking desperately, where has the money gone? To line the pockets of the fat cat private parasite providers, for sure. And if Sunak was really telling the truth, and he wasn’t, then how come there has been a further 2% cut in funding GPs in the 2024/25 accounting year?
I am waiting five weeks to speak to a clinician about my mental health. I can live with that because it’s an going thing for me and always has been, It doesn’t make it any easier – it’s life destroying, actually – but if I can live with it, how about those who could die with it? I’m not joking. Poor mental health can arrive from nowhere at any time to, I would suggest, anyone. Having known countless people who have committed suicide as a direct result of mental health crises, five weeks for a phone call may just be a little too late, especially said clinician then refers you to a couple of websites.
Obviously, I refer to the GP services crisis through the prism of my own life and I am well aware that there will be thousands, perhaps millions, of other folk who are bumping along the bottom of life with debilitating mental and physical conditions that could really do with treatment. But the worrying conclusion from all this is that the old days when you simply turned up to see a GP and more latterly got a physical appointment are long gone.
The one thing we know for sure is that our NHS, the pride of Britain, is at a crossroads. We either invest properly in the service and ensure people get first class treatment, free at the point of delivery, or we don’t. And the alternative will be the American system, based on insurance, where only the richest survive and the rest can go to hell.
I could easily write the script for my upcoming clinician call, but I’ll take it anyway, if only so that I am another number on the long list of people being let down by our government. And next year, if I haven’t died by then (always possible), I’ll do it all over again.
In 1983 just before the general election, the Labour MP Neil Kinnock said this: “If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.”
He was bang on about that, as Thatcher set about destroying the public sector in general and the NHS in particular. It took the Labour government of 1997 many years to clear up the Tory mess and if Rishi Sunak appears to be winning the next election, someone will need to make Kinnock’s speech again because one more term of the Conservatives will mean the end of the NHS. If you thought Britain was broken now – and it is – then just imagine five more years of Tory wrecking, worse than the last 14.
