I had one of my increasingly regular ‘what the fuck is going on with the NHS?’ moments yesterday, quite separate from my five week wait to speak to a ‘clinician’ about my see-sawing mental health. Although my Man Flu from last week has largely gone away, the deepest, most unpleasant cough I have had in years has not. As an asthmatic, I’m familiar with breathlessness from time to time, but this has been on another level. And as I am growing increasingly knackered after night after night of broken sleep, I decided to seek GP advice. It didn’t go well.
Our local health centre uses an on-line system for enquiries, whereby you state your concerns and symptoms and they come back to you. Yesterday, the reply came back to say that a ‘prescribing pharmacist’ would get back to me and, sure enough, late that afternoon one called. In what was the most pointless medical call in history, the ‘prescribing pharmacist’, from a completely different part of the area which I have never used, had the manner seemingly of someone who was being prevented by me from doing far more important work. Anyway, he went through what was presumably a precis of the form I’d filled out and concluded that I had a cough and should take some cough medicine. Oh, and that I had asthma. If I hadn’t already worked out I had a cough and chronic asthma, this might have been revelatory, but this was no help at all. I played my last card.
I was recently prescribed a different type of asthma inhaler instead of the blue Salbutamol version, but would he, given my current issues, be able to prescribe some of old inhalers to stabilise my breathing? He was after all, a ‘prescribing pharmacist’. “You’ll need to ask your doctor about that,” he replied, before returning to far more important work. Before I could say , “But you’re a prescribing pharmacist” he was gone. And, not for the first time, I was left cursing at the state of the NHS in general and local health care in particular.
I know what happens now. I’ll order some Salbutamol inhalers and it will be queried by one of the staff because my comments I made about the need for temporary relief which I put on the first on-line form and to the ‘prescribing pharmacist’ will not have been recorded anywhere. It does piss me off.
Hopefully, this deep-seated cough and its accompanying breath shortages will just pass in time, which will be just as well because locally I might as well have asked my local barber for medical advice when I saw him yesterday. I’m used to regulating my own breathing when my asthma is bad and I rarely panic, but if this is not a normal experience for you and you suddenly find it harder to breathe the stresses can mount, sometimes requiring a significant medical intervention. Who does that help?
It is tiresome for you, dear reader, to listen to my broken record about the good old days of GP services over and over again, but it’s still true that things used to be so much better than this. I grew up in Briz, otherwise known as Brislington, in east Bristol. There were numerous GP surgeries and they were comprised of two doctors working on the ground floor of what was, to all intents and purposes, a regular house, with the back room as the consulting room and the front room as the waiting room. They were the only employees, no clinicians, no nurse practitioners, no long line of receptionists and if you wanted to see a GP, you turned up during surgery hours and you would see one, no appointment necessary. I can think of nothing about the current system that works better than that, other than it’s probably much cheaper and in Broken Britain that’s probably all the government cares about.
So yesterday, I wasted quite a lot of time for literally no purpose. It was tick box treatment that frankly I could have administered personally far quicker and, dare I suggest, far more effectively.
I appreciate that to the layperson, with no current medical issues, this might appear to be just a whinge, but trust me when I say that if you have something healthwise than needs fixing, and you will do one day, then the current system if not just unfit for purpose, it’s a shambles.
