Now the NHS was the best thing sinced a sliced loaf of bread...much of it still is...but not all. The GP's are in a league all of their own and it ain't a good league.
Yesterday due to a medication mix up I contacted my GP surgery....the experience was eye poppingly bad.
"You are customer number one in the queue"
Customer...what the heck?
A whole 20 minutes later (customer zero took a very long time), I spoke to a lesser known example of a GP's rotweiller (aka receptionist)
She dutifully told me that out of the 10 usual GP's, only 3 were available as the rest are on "annual leave"...an appointment face to face which is classed as "urgent" would be an average of 21 days wait - "so sorry, we are terribly short staffed"
Although what I had told her over the phone was correct having read my records, she still had to ask a GP to sign off that a mistake had been made and change the records accordingly - "so sorry but it might take anything up to 28 days....we are terribly short staffed, so sorry"
I casually mentioned the three jabs......the annual flu, the pneumonia (which had been promised for the last 4 years but never delivered) and the virus booster - "so sorry but the nurses aren't doing those anymore, they only work 3 days a week and are unable to do home visits for vaccinations to customers like yourself who is housebound....so, sorry"
OK so I asked who would be doing the jabs this year..."so sorry, but there will be quite a long wait due to the district nurses from the hospital are handling that, so sorry"
That would be 10 district nurses for a city, its suburbs and outlying villages...give or take 3.5 million people since all jabs would be home visits due to the fact they only have a tiny office in the hospital's basement and no facility to do jabs at the hospital. "so sorry"
The GP union in the UK has taken it upon itself to recommend that its member GP's go on strike after they were kindly requested to stop working from home on zoom or phone appointments and get back to doing face to face at their surgeries since the worst of the Coronavirus has now passed, the majority of bodies are vaccinated and there really is no reason not to go to work normally
"so sorry"
(And if you use the Klinik messaging system now rolled out across all NHS GP surgeries, they have a 3-4 week backlog.... "so sorry")