Yorkshire patients are going private as they lose faith in NHS shortcomings: Andrew Vine
A private GP surgery has just opened close to my home, and one of its staff told me that patients can’t sign up fast enough.
All tell the people on reception – and the doctor they see for an initial appointment – the same thing. They’re going private because of the shortcomings of their NHS surgeries.
Their stories are familiar to most of us who have rung our surgery in recent years.
There is the 8am telephone scramble for an appointment, the wait of days or even weeks to see a doctor, and then the likelihood of seeing a GP they have never met before for what feels like the briefest of consultations, when what they want is to talk through a problem with somebody who knows them and their medical history.
They’ll get a same-day appointment with a familiar face who has time to listen at the new surgery, and that’s why they are signing up so fast, even though my corner of Yorkshire is not particularly affluent and the cost of private healthcare will be a stretch for most of the residents.
But they’re finding the money for peace of mind, because they’ve lost faith in the NHS front line. They want the traditional family doctor back, who is available when called, and that means paying for it.
Only time will tell if the government’s plans to bring health services closer to home with more GPs and bigger surgeries offering a wider range of treatments persuade these newly-private patients that the NHS is able to look after them in the way they expect.
The 10-year plan to “fundamentally rewire” the NHS had a familiar ring to it.
The Health Foundation chief executive, Dr Jennifer Dixon, said: “These ambitions have appeared in NHS plans for decades.”
Under Tony Blair’s Labour government, and at least twice during the 14 years of its Conservative successors, very similar proposals were put forward.
Let’s take the pressure off hospitals, said ministers, and bring services much nearer to the people who need them. It was a good idea then, and still is, but never really worked.
That means there has to be a serious doubt over whether it will work this time, especially given the financial pressures on the government and the fact that the NHS is in a much worse state than it was in the late 1990s or the first decade of the 2000s.
Sir Keir Starmer had barely announced his plans before awkward questions were asked by health professionals and think-tanks. Where will the money come from? And the staff for 200 new neighbourhood health centres?
There was a lot of vague talk about using artificial intelligence to boost healthcare without specifying how, but the bit most likely to undermine public confidence in the government’s vision for the NHS came with Sir Keir saying he wanted to move the NHS away from being a “sickness service”.
Sorry Prime Minister, but a sickness service is precisely what people want the NHS to provide. That’s why it was set up in the first place, to help people who fall sick, for whatever reason. If you don’t understand that, you’re out of step with the views of an overwhelming majority of people.
What they want of the NHS is speedy access to excellent treatment when ill or injured. Not having to wait weeks to see a GP, 24 hours on an emergency trolley, or months for an operation on a problem that wrecks their everyday lives or leaves them unable to work.
Attempting to switch the function of the NHS to preventing illness sidesteps the everyday concerns and frustrations of patients who cannot access essential medical treatment.
Anybody with a modicum of intelligence has already taken on board the endlessly-repeated illness-avoidance mantras about not smoking, drinking in moderation, eating sensibly and taking exercise.
Devoting millions of pounds to further lecturing people won’t fix the NHS, bring waiting times down, or free up hospital beds occupied by elderly patients who can’t be discharged because the social care system is a disaster area and there is nowhere for them to go.
The government is right to identify the problems of GP surgeries as a first step towards revamping the NHS. The demands on hospitals are, at least in part, so overwhelming because people cannot get an appointment with a doctor and turn up at accident and emergency departments instead.
If their local surgery could see them promptly, and provide a range of other services including out-patient appointments, patients would support the government’s plans.
But if we see new super-surgeries being built without enough doctors or other staff to look after patients, the 10-year plan will turn out like so many of the similarly bold announcements of the past – an ambition doomed to fail, even as it spent huge sums of money for little visible sign of improvement.