It was distressing to hear about the practice in East Manchester that suffered a physical attack recently. All our thoughts are with the staff of that particular practice. It will be tough to recover from an experience like that, and our hearts go out to them.
The worry for everyone is that this isn’t an isolated incident, but part of a developing trend. In his response to the attack, BMA GP Committee Chair Dr Richard Vautrey said that this assault “is part of a terrible trend of growing abuse, vitriol and violence that is being directed towards our healthcare workers”. A BMA tracker survey in July of this year found that over half of GPs had experienced verbal abuse in the last month, and two thirds reported that their experience of abuse, threatening behaviour or violence had worsened in the last year.
What these figures don’t show is the number of staff who have either left already because they’ve simply had enough of it, or are planning to leave as soon as they get the chance. If staff don’t feel safe at work, they won’t stay. The workforce crisis that lies underneath many of these issues is just being made worse by the situation we’re increasingly finding ourselves in.
What’s most galling about this situation is that it feels like a direct result of a national narrative created by political and health service leaders. A reasonable operating procedure to protect the vulnerable patients who do need to attend surgeries during the ongoing pandemic as well as to manage the sheer volume of demand coming into practices means that many patients are offered a telephone or remote consultation first.
Inevitably some aren’t happy about this. But instead of supporting practices in the face of these complaints the Secretary of State declared that GPs must “start operating in the way they did before the pandemic and offering face-to-face appointments to everyone who would like one” and “more GPs should be offering face-to-face access and we intend to do a lot more about it”.
Meanwhile secondary care blames its inability to cope with its demand on ‘people not being able to see their GP’. NHS England began colluding with this particular narrative when it wrote to practices in May saying that face-to-face appointments had to be offered to patients. It’s four months on but for many practices that letter still stings, primarily due to the lack of support it demonstrated for general practice despite everything it’s done and been through in the last 18 months.
Where do we go from here? It may be that the attack in Manchester acts as a watershed and we start to see a rowing back from the language that’s become increasingly prevalent in recent months. But it might be that the rhetoric continues, and then what? It will only be a matter of time before security guards become commonplace in GP practices.
In this month’s Practice Index practice manager panel, we discuss the situation we’re now in, try and understand it, and consider whether it’s possible to change the national narrative surrounding general practice.
October 1, 2021 at 7:44 am
The issues are most people understand how Secondary Care and Hospitals work they are departmental medical care Haematology, Neurology, Cardiac Care.
GPs by nature are General Practitioners their area of work is whatever walks through the door, triage can guide, yet a patient may attend with a condition, then launch into a whole series of issues.
Very few people unless working in Primary Care understand how it works including Government and many Secondary Care workers.
That which is not understood is the subject of criticism, with a view if they do not know they refer to hospital, this is not the case our work load is mammoth, remove us and Secondary Care would see queues, that would make a motorway snarl up look like a walk in the park.
I have been in the NHS twenty years working in Secondary, Intermediate and Primary Care, all services do their very best and NHS workers across all areas are proud people who care and serve a belief in a system that saved my daughters life now a GP.
I am proud to work in the NHS and even during the dark mornings of Feb 20 when COVID was a frightening unknown quantity, we still all went in.
We did not ask for people to clap or give us priority over access to Supermarkets, yet those Supermarkets who worked alongside us and we respected and would chat to staff.
It helped us all through life was not easy for any of us, yet we still now plough on, this week in Primary (GP care delivering Covid Booster Vaccines, only possible several months ago as Hub based, yet our rewards are abuse, aggression and violence , from I must say a very uninformed minority of patients, most of who help us and thank us, so let us praise those Volunteer Patients who have supported us and still do, meeting and greeting patients, taking pressure off staff.
What boring news the above is, and to those who abuse and attack front line care workers, what would replace us a system that sees, those who can only afford quality healthcare, having nearly lost the most precious thing in my life my daughter, nobody will stop me doing my job, and all my NHS Colleagues would Echo this.