Patient pain

MY LOCAL health centre has moved from a doctor-owned partnership to one of 20 practices owned by a private company — a situation that is being repeated across the country.

This has obvious benefits for the doctors who become salaried employees in a well-paid job with the right to ask for flexible working and no worries about after-hours duties.

But patients lose out. We have ten doctors at my surgery, but due to part-time work and job sharing, they add up to the equivalent of just five and three-quarters full-time doctors.

TONY FOOT, Mosterton, Dorset. I AM so glad the Mail is highlighting the lack of face-to-face appointments with GPs, but it’s also a problem with hospital consultants.

My husband has been waiting months to see a urologist and has just been told he will have yet another telephone appointment because the urology department isn’t seeing people face to face.

Why not? They aren’t looking at their patients’ faces!

JENNY McGREGOR, Bishop’s Stortford, Herts.