Sock marks and suspected sickies

Research shows that many GPs find their workload unmanageable, with inappropriate referrals from other agencies and patients attending for trivial reasons. Caroline Winter-Jones reports 'Doctor, my six-year-old is peeing a lot. I’m giving him four times the recommended dose of a supplement I got on the internet — it has frequent peeing listed as a side-effect — do you think I should stop it?’ These few lines amount to one of the biggest challenges facing general practice today — what is a GP really for? This is just one example sent to us in response to a BMA News request to GPs. It is to the ‘free-at-the-point-of-abuse’ family doctor that every paranoid parent, downtrodden worker and stretched social agency seems to turn.   'Risk sink' ‘People’s expectations are continually raised by the politicians about what the NHS is for and there seems to be no appetite to discuss what the NHS shouldn’t be for,’ says Sussex GP Russell Brown, founder of Resilient GP, a 3,500-strong Facebook group of like-minded practitioners. General practice, says Dr Brown, is the ‘risk sink’ of the NHS: ‘For example, an old lady has fallen over at home. Paramedics have visited and got her back up. '[There are] no obvious injuries, so they can’t see any reason to take her to hospital, but they phone us and say “GP to check”. ‘Well, she’s either injured or she isn’t. If she is...
Source: BMA News - Category: UK Health Source Type: news