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Covid-19
Metro
Matt Hancock is looking for your forgiveness
Covid bereaved say get out of here!’ read the 10m banner flown over the I’m A Celebrity jungle by campaign group 38 Degrees this week, sending a clear message to former health secretary Matt Hancock.
I couldn’t agree more.
As a spokesperson from the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice said: ‘Hancock isn’t a celebrity – he’s the former health secretary who oversaw the UK having one of the highest death tolls in the world from Covid-19, while breaking his own lockdown rules.’
I’m a GP – if Sajid Javid thinks charging patients will help us he’s wrong
Miles from land, working as a cruise ship doctor in the middle of the Atlantic, I was treating a patient having a heart attack.
He was in dire need of a clot-busting injection, but as I opened the cupboard to draw it up, the chief nurse took me aside and whispered to me: ‘have you asked their partner if they’re happy to pay for this?’
The medicine cost $7k a vial. I then had to go and have that conversation with an already incredibly stressed relative.
The GP crisis requires more than just technology to fix it
The sweeping reforms described in a recent document by UK think tank Policy Exchange, At your service: A proposal to reform general practice and enable digital healthcare at scale, have triggered discussion and concern among GPs
Tories fall four years behind in pledge to hire 6000 more GPs
Quoted in article: Ellen Welch, GP and editorial lead with Doctors’ Association UK, said: “I don’t think the general public have a grasp of what part-time working actually means in general practice. As a part-time GP I have 48 patients booked each day. This is the norm. “UK GPs are consulting at levels way above the 25 patient contacts per day considered safe by the EU.” She said that pressures from the wider system fell on general practice, with the 6.2 million people waiting for hospital treatment coming to GPs for support.
“No other profession is routinely asked to defend their working patterns in the way GPs are,” she said. “If GPs didn’t work part time, numbers would fall even more rapidly due to burnout.”
DAUK’s GP Team were among the signatories to a letter published in The Observer this weekend, opposing the view that general practice’s problems could be overcome by hiring younger doctors
Time for change: widening participation in the UKFPO foundation programme
A total of 791 final year medical students were placed on the reserve list for the UK Foundation Programme (UKFPO) last week, after not being allocated a placement for FY1. This is the largest reserve list to date and an increase of 300 from last year, despite official figures showing that the NHS in England is short of almost 8,200 doctors. It costs £230 000 to train a single medical student. So why, in the context of an understaffed NHS with worsening rates of workforce attrition due to the covid-19 pandemic, can we still not provide timely job security to all final year medical students?
