IN MY VIEW... PRACTISING MEDICINE IN A RUSH IS WRONG

TO ATTEMPT to practise medicine at high speed is to court danger.

So last week’s news that some family doctors are treating as many as 100 patients a day — three times the safe limit — must alarm us all.

Indeed, when I talk to colleagues still working in general practice, they live in daily fear of making a mistake. They greet news of any reported error made by another doctor in the spirit of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.

They know that the crushing workload most are under can all too easily lead to catastrophe.

There are not enough GPs to go round, and for the nation’s wellbeing, this is a crisis in the true sense of the word.

But it is not just a rapidly expanding population and increased longevity that is to blame — people don’t want to be GPs any more.

After the Bristol heart surgery scandal in the Nineties, when excessive numbers of babies died during cardiac surgery, and the multiple murders by Harold Shipman, the medical profession came under intense scrutiny with annual appraisals, revalidation and relicensing, and the rigours of the Care Quality Commission inspections. The aim was to improve standards and protect the public, but, as we now see, it had the opposite effect.

Middle-aged GPs are retiring early: disillusioned, chronically fatigued, anxious about the inevitability of errors, and no longer able to practise medicine in a compassionate and supportive way.

We GPs trained to make life for our patients more bearable, but the changes forced upon us, due to lack of foresight and hopeless kneejerk decisions made by governments, have made this impossible. It is going to get — I am sad to say — even worse. Urgent action needs to be taken, not just to advertise jobs but to make being a GP an attractive proposition once more — it’s a move from which we can all benefit.