in all honesty giving GP's control scares the hell out of me.
I have already seen the affect on GP's been run privately.
Examples.
0845 number to ring them up.
Extremely hard to get home visits, almost impossible in fact.
Massive variation of GP quality between different GP's my parents GP has no problem doing phone consultation, mine refuses to do it.
Some GP's dont even have permenant GP staff, they just always use temps as cheaper.
A reluctance to reffer people as it costs money.
Are we going to see GP's refuse to take patients (previously the nhs trust forced them to). So end up like the dentist situation where millions of people dont have a dentist.
Finally the tendancy to make patients see a nurse or someone else who isnt a fully trained doctor instead of a GP as not enough GP's to see all patients.
Also what parts of the NHS do people consider overstaffed? and how have they came to that conclusion. for what its worth I do feel the NHS has excessive nurses but a severe shortage of doctors.
Everytime the tories are in power they privatise something and then a few people get very rich out of it.
Ultimately once something is privatised freedom of information act requests cant be done either and they can hide behind commercial confidentiality.
My thoughts are and always will be that anything that affects someones welfare should not be run for profit or privatised.
---------- Post added at 05:36 ---------- Previous post was at 05:14 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by slowcoach
Privatisation is the answer.
Water, Gas, Electricity, Buses and Trains prove the point, all are relatively much cheaper for the consumer now.
---takes off my blinkers and climbs back into my straight jacket.  |
you lost me, gas is certianly not much cheaper it is much more expensive.
However people have the wrong atittude if they think cost is king for healthcare, which would you prefer.
a 85% efficient helathcare system that can succesfully treat 10million people year.
or a 60% efficient more expensive healthcare system that can treat 12 million a year.
to me its the latter very time and how do you decide if its efficient?
Some of the things labour did for the nhs are good like the waiting list times and nhs trusts, where they went wrong was giving out huge wage increases without real justification which ended up chewing up significant parts of the extra funding as well as giving away too much to GP's who incidently now do less patient care for more money.