A text arrives from my local medical centre:
Dear Patient,
Between now and Jan 7th we will be focussing our efforts on the covid booster campaign. Please do not contact us for routine, non-urgent or long term conditions. If you contact us with non-urgent requests in this period and we are too busy, we will ask you to contact again later in Jan and will close the request. We have opened new vaccine appointments and invited those that are eligible for the booster.
My local Medical Centre.
The pedant in me is still a little obsessed with the medical centre’s spelling of ‘focusing’ but that’s neither here nor there. Most of me is bothered with what constitutes “routine, non-urgent or long term conditions.”
I have a few “long term conditions”, including high blood pressure, chronic asthma and – oh, what was the other one? – ah yes, severe clinical depression. I knew there was something but as you know I never write about it on here so it’s easy to forget. And, unless things got dramatically worse, I wouldn’t even think of contacting the health centre for any of them. I am assuming – because otherwise why send such a text to everyone? – that plenty of patients contact their GPs for trivial things?
I take various things from the message:
- The NHS is already at full stretch and it won’t take much before it breaks altogether.
- That the millions of us on already very long waiting lists will have to wait even longer.
- That not everyone at my local medical centre can spell.
Basically, the NHS is now dealing with Covid and certainly locally next to nothing else. And things can only get worse.
