By the way ... I found home visits so rewarding

AFTER 37 years as a full-time GP, with at least one weekend in three spent on call, I went part-time two years ago, escaping under the wire as the pressure on GPs started to escalate. I can now see just how lucky I was.

Recently I commiserated with a colleague who is still at the coalface of general practice. I explained the joys of the golden era that I now realise I enjoyed. Though daily house calls were arduous, they were one of the most fulfilling parts of my job and enormously appreciated by patients.

In contrast, he told me he has done only four house calls in the past five years.

The task of general practice for him and his partners has changed so much that there is no longer time for such ‘luxuries’.

They are under far too much pressure, with 12-hour days at the surgery. Anyone who phones with an emergency is advised to call an ambulance and go straight to A&E.

Against this background of stressful, nonstop changes in the NHS, in late 2015, Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) were introduced. They are the latest attempt at rearranging the deck chairs on the NHS Titanic.

The STPs are a coming together of NHS organisations and local councils to — wait for it — enhance quality, develop new models of care and improve health, wellbeing and efficiency.

A key feature of the STPs is to cut the number of beds in many hospitals, despite more and more patients going to A&E, increasing emergency admissions and the fact that bed occupancy rates are at more than 85 per cent (many of us will have seen the photographs of ambulances queuing outside A& E waiting to offload patients).

Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England, has acknowledged that reducing the number of beds will work only if there are ‘credible plans’ for alternatives in the community.

Yet we have a crisis in general practice, with many GPs planning to retire early and fewer new doctors being recruited.

So how can sending sick patients out of hospital possibly be a viable plan if GPs are so tightly under the cosh that, for the most part, home care is history?

Is that really a new model of care?