Scheme starting this month is aimed at improving Britain’s poor record on early diagnosis
All GPs in England will be able to refer suspected cancer patients for tests without them first having to see a specialist under an NHS initiative designed to speed up diagnosis.
The scheme, which starts this month, will let family doctors send patients with potential symptoms straight to have a scan, X-ray or other diagnostic test.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Steve Barclay not tasked with manifesto commitment, raising fears that shortage of doctors in England will continue
Rishi Sunak has fuelled concerns that the government will miss its target of recruiting 6,000 more GPs in England, which was promised in the 2019 Conservative manifesto.
The prime minister omitted the pledge from his appointment letter to the health secretary, Steve Barclay, laying out expectations for what should be delivered by March 2024.
Continue reading...The chancellor says the move will save 28m people £330 on average next year
Catholics outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time, a demographic milestone for a state that was designed a century ago to have a permanent Protestant majority, my colleague Rory Carroll reports.
Thérèse Coffey is deputy prime minister as well as health secretary. Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain this morning, and responding to a question from the former Labour MP Ed Balls, who was presenting, she said that as deputy PM whould be would “chairing things like the home affairs committee and different elements like that”. But she rejected claims this meant she would be doing the health job part time. She said:
I’m conscious that in two weeks we’ve already pulled together our plan for patients and we will continue to develop that.
I don’t think it will be a case of being part-time ... We don’t have fixed working hours.
Continue reading...New health secretary’s demand to improve patient access to GP care in England is immediately criticised by family doctors
No patient should have to wait more than two weeks to see a GP, the new health secretary will demand , in a move that has already been criticised by family doctors.
Thérèse Coffey will on Thursday set out a new “expectation” that everyone seeking an appointment with a GP should get one within 14 days while outlining a major plan to tackle the NHS’s growing crisis.
Continue reading...PM hopeful co-authored pamphlet that also called for doctors’ pay to be slashed by 10% and abolition of universal child benefit
Liz Truss called for patients to be charged to see their GP and for doctors’ pay to be slashed by 10% in a pamphlet she co-authored in 2009, the unearthed document has revealed.
The Tory leadership frontrunner also wanted to see the universal child benefit abolished in the report, which she co-wrote with six other people when she was deputy director of the Reform thinktank.
Continue reading...Seeing natural event as hormone deficiency requiring treatment could increase women’s anxiety, say medics
Doctors have hit back at critics saying they are failing menopausal women, and said that treating menopause as a hormone deficiency that requires medical treatment could fuel negative expectations and make matters worse.
Writing in the British Medical Journal they said there was an urgent need for a more realistic and balanced narrative which actively challenges the idea that menopause is synonymous with an inevitable decline in women’s health and wellbeing, and called for continued efforts to improve awareness about the symptoms and how to deal with them.
Continue reading...Doctors say violence now commonplace as surgeries struggle to cope with ‘unmanageable levels of demand’
Criminal acts of violence at GP surgeries across the UK have almost doubled in five years, new figures reveal, as doctors’ leaders warn of a perfect storm of soaring demand and staff shortages.
Police are now recording an average of three violent incidents at general practices every day. Staff are facing unprecedented assaults, abuse and aggression by patients, with surgeries struggling to cope with “unmanageable levels of demand” after years of failure to recruit or retain sufficient numbers of family doctors.
Continue reading...Doctors say staff ‘afraid and at risk’ of patient violence and aggression as services come under pressure
The number of violent incidents at general practices in the UK recorded by the police has almost doubled in the last five years, according to an investigation by the BMJ.
GP leaders say “appalling” assaults, harassment and other forms of abuse aimed at doctors and their staff have worsened during the pandemic, as surgeries came under growing pressure and sections of the media perpetuated the false notion that services were “closed”.
Continue reading...Prof Ben Goldacre cited risks of deanonymisation as his main reason for withdrawing his consent
The author of a government review into medical data sharing personally opted out of the aborted plan to share GP health data, a parliamentary committee has heard.
Prof Ben Goldacre, a former Guardian columnist and the author of the Goldacre Review, exercised his right to opt out of the Government’s General Practice Data for Planning and Research scheme, he told the Commons Science and Technology committee, because he was concerned about the risks of deanonymisation.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Women forced to turn to black market or share drugs as concerns rise over mental and physical impact
The hormone replacement therapy (HRT) supply crisis must be resolved quickly because “so many women” are experiencing distress and some are risking serious side effects by using medication prescribed to others, the UK’s most senior GP has warned.
There have been acute shortages of some HRT products, which are used by about 1 million women in the UK to treat symptoms of the menopause. Some women have turned to the black market or are meeting up with other women in carparks to buy, swap or share medicines.
Continue reading...Exclusive: pharmacists say they should be allowed more easily to dispense substitute medicines as shortages take toll in England
Sajid Javid is being urged to change the law to let pharmacists alter prescriptions during medicine shortages, as it emerged that some women are travelling hundreds of miles to seek hormone replacement therapy products.
There have been acute shortages of some HRT products, which are used by about 1 million women in the UK to treat symptoms of the menopause.
Continue reading...Practitioners’ struggles include increased workloads, greater demand from patients, and paperwork
A third of GPs in England say they want to quit within five years, according to a regular survey which warns that clinical doctors are especially unhappy with the number of hours they work.
The survey of 2,195 GPs undertaken in 2021 found 33% planned to leave “direct patient care” by 2026. The figure represents a return to levels last seen in 2015, after plans to quit peaked in 2018 when two in five GPs wanted to stop seeing patients within five years.
Continue reading...From MPs to GPs, reality TV contestants and even teachers, it seems that anyone in public life can be made to fear for their survival. What’s behind the abuse – and how can it be stopped?
When Jon Burke went into local politics in 2014 he never imagined there would come a time when he considered carrying a rolling pin hidden inside his raincoat when he left the house – “just in case someone jumped out of a car at me with a wrench”. But his mind turned to raiding his kitchen drawers for protection last September, after Hackney council officials called him to say they had received a handwritten letter that threatened to burn down his house while he was sleeping and hurt not just him, but his wife and children.
His crime? Trying to make Hackney a better, safer place – in his eyes – to walk or ride a bike, via the introduction of low traffic neighbourhoods. As the London borough’s cabinet member for transport, Burke found himself at the centre of a row that had become part of the culture wars in which four wheels were pitted against two. The anonymous letter writer made clear they were a car driver: “You fucking cunts ride a bicycle,” they observed.
Continue reading...Family doctors reject plan to force them to see any patient who wants face-to-face appointment
GPs in England are threatening to take industrial action in protest at the government’s bid to force them to see any patient who wants a face-to-face appointment.
The British Medical Association’s GPs committee voted unanimously to reject the plan by the health secretary, Sajid Javid, that included “naming and shaming” surgeries that see too few patients in person.
Continue reading...Health secretary falls short of apologising for government decision to delay first lockdown but says ‘there are lessons to learn’
The health secretary has said he is sorry for the losses that have occurred due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but fell short of apologising for the government’s decision to delay lockdown last March.
Sajid Javid’s comments came in response to the publication on Tuesday of a damning health select committee report on lessons learned from the pandemic, which found the government’s management of the outbreak was one of the worst public health failures in British history.
Continue reading...Thinktank says longer wait for treatment since Covid pandemic is main reason, in study of 11 countries
The NHS has lost its prestigious ranking as the best health system in a study of 11 rich countries by an influential US thinktank.
The UK has fallen from first to fourth in the Commonwealth Fund’s latest analysis of the performance of the healthcare systems in the nations it studied.
Continue reading...Nurses, teachers, GPs and police officers among those to give evidence to cross-party inquiry
More than 450 key workers with long Covid have told a cross-party parliamentary inquiry of their experiences of the condition, including struggles to return to work and lack of financial support, with one in 10 having lost their job.
Nurses, teachers, GPs, police officers and midwives were among those who shared their experience of long Covid, symptoms of which include debilitating fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pains, sleeping difficulties and brain fog.
Continue reading...Calls for national screening programme as symptoms revealed range from brain fog to tinnitus
The largest ever international study of people with long Covid has identified more than 200 symptoms and prompted researchers to call for a national screening programme.
The study found the myriad symptoms of long Covid – from brain fog and hallucinations to tremors and tinnitus – spanned 10 of the body’s organ systems, and a third of the symptoms continued to affect patients for at least six months.
Continue reading...Unions demand fair compensation for dozens of doctors now unable to work because of debilitating symptoms
Family doctors are being forced out of their jobs after developing long Covid, prompting demands for the government to compensate NHS staff with the debilitating condition who cannot work.
GPs struggling with the condition have told the Observer they felt “shocked and betrayed” when their colleagues removed them from their posts because of prolonged sick leave.
Continue reading...For almost a year our small clinic has been struggling with the horrors of the coronavirus pandemic. So being able to give our staff and most vulnerable patients their first doses of the vaccine has been a real turning point
During the week I work in a small, inner-city GP practice in Edinburgh with 14 staff, caring for almost 4,000 patients. Before the pandemic, I used to see 25-30 people in face-to-face appointments every day. A year into the pandemic, the need out there is the same, but my GP colleagues and I manage more like five or six face-to-face (or mask-to-mask) consultations, a home visit or two, and the remainder on the phone or through video calls. It’s not the best way to practise medicine, but for the moment, it’s the best we have.
The first I heard of the vaccine rollout was back in October, when our practice manager received an email from the health board asking if we would have capacity to vaccinate the over-80s among our patients. We said yes, of course: in the past year we’ve had four patients die of Covid-19, three of them over 80.
Continue reading...