“General practitioners like me are kneeling on the ground-it feels like we are yelling in a bottomless pit”

I hate Clap your hands at the door on Thursday night During the epidemic; I know exactly how things will end. Applause is an empty and shallow gesture-painful to bear.Once the immediate threat of death fades and fades into something we just “learned to live with”, people will return Blame the general practitioner Because of laziness and money grabbing. I have been a GP for the past 16 years and I am tired of it.

I don’t know what else we can do to prove that we are working as hard as we can and seeing all patients who really need to face-to-face. Before the pandemic, we saw about 80% of patients face to face.We still see 60% of patients Face to face -The remaining 20% ​​fall into the category of “secure remote management”.

But everyone has made their own decisions about what they think their GP is doing-no one seems to hear the yelling about how hard we work. It felt like yelling in a bottomless pit—no one was listening.

I worked at locum GP East London, Kent with Sussex, So I have a very broad understanding of the difficulties the NHS faces across the country. In terms of workload and the number of patients we see, this work has changed dramatically in the past two years. There are many challenges, but the main challenge is just the sheer number of patients we see-compared to this time two years ago, the number of patient contacts has increased by approximately 8.5%.

Given that our workload before the pandemic is already at a critical point, this increase in workload, coupled with the public’s perception that we are “closed” and “cannot see patients face to face”, feels like a very heavy and heavy burden .

I am very accustomed to doing remote consultation, they don’t look for me. I did these jobs for various digital healthcare companies before the pandemic, and I have enough confidence in my clinical ability to determine when patients need or don’t need face-to-face assessments. The fact is that most patient-oriented general practitioner jobs don’t actually require face-to-face appointments. Drug review, repeated prescriptions, chronic disease review…Most of them can be done very safely while working remotely.

Other patients who do need face-to-face evaluation are actually still being seen—it’s just that their first point of contact will be a phone or video call so that we can classify them and assess whether they need a face-to-face appointment. The simple reason for this is to help us manage the workload. We are not “evading” the virus. We are implementing a patient classification system so that we can see the most patients in the most effective way. Telephone appointments take much less time than face-to-face appointments, which is the main reason why we currently use this method.

The main disadvantage of remote consultation is actually not the lack of physical examination, but the more subtle and subtle aspects of general practice that are affected.Opportunistic conversation with exhausted mother Mental Health; The sharp-eyed GP noticed a possibility skin cancer On the nose of their 80-year-old regular visitor, he was there to check blood pressure; the quiet, withdrawn child, with unexplained bruises, was checking for irrelevant things. These are the contents of training that general practitioners have received. We often call it our “spider sensation”-a feeling that is a bit wrong and needs further digging and exploration. These are the things lost in remote consultation. we know.

Of course, we also know that some disadvantaged groups in the population almost always prefer—and will benefit from—face-to-face appointments.This applies especially to Elderly population, And in general, these people are still face-to-face-it’s just that we have to talk to them on the phone to manage our workload.

As for reports that some general practitioners refuse to see any patients face-to-face, I don’t know that there is one approach that works—and I work in a large geographic area with many different approaches. If someone really refuses to see a doctor face-to-face, I can only imagine that it is because they are overwhelmed by the workload and are unable to see the doctor in person.

In general, general practitioners are expert communicators, decision makers, and clinicians working in a pressure cooker environment—we have adapted to the ever-changing pandemic from the beginning. We have provided a very successful vaccination plan and continue to carry out all our daily clinical work, administrative work and some work-facing our own illness, colleague illness and even death in some cases.

After all, we are human beings, and in the greatest health disaster our generation has witnessed, we are doing our best to keep the NHS united.There is only so much abuse we can endure—a lot GP chooses to retire early Or simply leave the industry, because they can’t stand it anymore.

I want to know what people would think if the general practitioner disappeared completely.This is a big possibility, because we actually have 1,500 fewer general practitioners today than six years ago, and the Minister of Health at the time promised that we would increase by 6,000 by 2021 Jeremy HuntNo one wants to do this job anymore, because it does make people sick. According to BMA data, 57% of doctors have one or more mental health conditions.

Do I blame Jeremy Hunt? I didn’t blame him in particular. He is part of the government, which has systematically cancelled NHS funding over the years-cutting budgets, closing clinics and services, and slowly eroding NHS employees, so that we feel that their value is like the soles of Ted Baker Bullock shoes It’s as important as the dog dung. . No one can blame for our current situation. This is simply a perfect storm-a global pandemic happened when the GP services and the NHS were already overwhelmed. Over the years, we have been kneeling-doing our best, doing our best. But it has been almost two years now, and we are exhausted. shattered. Completely and completely floor.

We tried to plug the gap in the sinking rowing boat with chewing gum and dirty rags, but the water continued to pour into the boat and we also sank. The public and the government need to put down their pitchforks and really listen to our voices. We are people who enter the medical world because we care about helping others. We are not the evil, greedy, golfing elites that many right-wingers want you to believe. What the government is doing is setting off a perfect storm to privatize the NHS once and for all — and make excuses for the GP’s downfall. Instead, they need to listen, lest it is too late.

Dr. Zoe Watson, 39, has been a qualified doctor for 16 years. She currently serves as a locum GP in East London, Kent and Sussex.