Dithering politicians and a crisis among GPs

THeRe was a time when i’d rather walk across hot coals in a Puffa jacket than visit my gP. My old surgery you see, was always a lottery. Some days you might strike it lucky and be seen by the super-efficient doctor with the keen eye and the sympathetic ear, other times you would be stuck with some half-asleep misery guts who thought every ailment under the sun could be solved with a prescription for temazepam.

These days i’m lucky enough to have a brilliant gP, the sort who listens, understands, diagnoses and refers, and a surgery that is never so booked up that you have to wait a month for an appointment.

But most of us have sat on the other side of enough doctors’ desks to know that this is not always the norm.

So it was with a grim sense of inevitability that i read this week about the 35-year-old Fife woman who went to see her gP after having found a lump in her breast, only to be informed that ‘women your age don’t get cancer’.

Deanna wilson was told to do nothing, go home and come back in six weeks if it was still there. it was only because she pressed the matter that the gP reluctantly referred her, telling her to ‘remember to cancel your appointment when the lump goes away to not waste their time’.

She was not wasting anyone’s time. Mrs wilson was marked as a low priority patient, so it was three months before she could see a specialist.

when she finally did get the consultation, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and given the devastating news that the disease had progressed.

Mrs wilson is now terminally ill, the cancer having spread to her liver and bones, damaging her hips and spine.

Most of us have heard a variation of this horror story over the years. The person with cancer who was repeatedly told it was only a back problem, or the woman with a brain aneurysm who was prescribed headache tablets.

it does not happen every day, but it does happen.

no one is saying a gP’s job is easy. Being deluged on a daily basis by a succession of people with a bruised big toe or a bit of a sniffle must be exhausting, and the job of weeding out the moaners from the medical emergencies must be fiendish.

But it is, when all is said and done, the job.

AnD it is a job that, increasingly, no one seems to want to do. Figures last year showed that the total number of gPs in Scotland slumped by 100 in the past two years, while vacancies have doubled since 2013.

Out-of-hours care is a struggle, with many surgeries reporting that they are unable to recruit locums for unplanned absences. More than a third of gPs plan to retire in the next five years.

The nHS is heading straight for a major crisis in Scotland when it comes to gP provision.

while it seems a mystery why so few wish to enter the profession – given that there is precious little weekend or evening work and many rake in around £100,000 a year – increasing caseloads and frustrations over how little time is spent with patients mean that many turn to other specialisms.

it is a thorny issue, but surely it is time for Health Secretary Shona Robison to get a grip of this situation. Because if something does not change soon, it will be patients who will suffer the most.