Doctors ‘n’ stuff

Right to reply

I had my meeting with the surgery manager and one of the senior doctors today. In fairness, I have to understand their reasons for the “appointment” mess assuming all their claims are true – and I have no reason to doubt them.

It’s true, they have to hit targets. If someone demands to see a GP on a given day, they have to at the very least speak to one. They’re contractually bound to do that. The problem is that there are far too many “abusers” of the system, especially in inner-city areas such as mine.

As a result you end up with, say, 50 appointments in a day. Of those, you may well find as many as 25 could have just gone to bloody Morrisons and bought some Paracetamol for the cold they’re insisting is plague or something.

It was agreed that the current system discriminates against workers as opposed to non-workers. Sadly, the only way to address this would be to as people “are you employed?” when they called. This is against the rules. The other problem is that of booking appointments too far ahead. When they tried this, they found that the vast majority of these were never attended. The individual involved either forgot, got better, or managed to wheedle into another clinic and didn’t cancel.

My area has more genuinely sick people than the average, by a fair margin. On the other hand, it’s not “overcrowded” in that we have a below average number of patients per doctor than the national. However, the books for my doctor’s are “open” for new patients so they are adding more people. The alternative is a complete closure of the books. There is no middle ground. This makes their life rather difficult in that they can’t, for instance, stop people jumping from doc to doc just to get the pills they want while still allowing a local household who are registered to get their brand new baby on the list. It’s all or nothing – government regulations.

Basically, the conversation was very two-sided. Although they can’t actually solve my problem, they’ve put it in perspective. As a result I can appreciate the position they’re in and the reasons they have for making those decisions. A new doctor has joined in the last few weeks as well, which should help – they lost two recently.

And I got my appointment.

Still on a medical theme

I’ve found this great blog by an emergency medical type person and it makes for entertaining, gruesome and though-provoking reading. Well worth a check. Coincidentally, he’s just about to start on some stories similar to the following one. I wrote this before I found that out.

I don’t have too many medical stories of my own, but this one’s a corker. It’s not a “friend of a friend” story – it happened to a guy I used to know years ago and I heard it first hand. I have no reason to doubt him because, frankly, he was that stupid. I won’t say who, nobody who reads this blog knows him (unless by some freak coincidence) so I don’t fell bad about telling it. Besides, it would be a shame not to share it.

Basically, he had a bit of a problem. A fairly embarassing one. He’d developed a little bit of a fetish and had caused himself a possible problem.

So, a trip to the university health centre was in order. Things got worse when he was informed that the only doctor in attendance was a young lady. He swallowed his pride and went in.

I believe he described his complaint somewhat like this:

“Erm… Well, what it is is that I kind of… erm… *sigh* I lost count. I’m not sure if I…”

pause

“I shoved a load of Monopoly hotels up my arse and I don’t know if I got them all back out or not.”

Not the way to impress a young lady in the medical profession.

This escapade was the last of his bumfoolery I heard of, but I know he also tried saucepan handles, amongst other things. I am so glad I didn’t have to share a house with him.