We must aim to lessen the load on our GPs
A GP racked up nearly 100 separate contacts with patients in a single day
When I was little I was very prone to ear infections. Mum would dose me with Calpol before school, but the only proper relief came with the antibiotics prescribed to me by our GP in St Andrews.
In my recollection, that relief always came swiftly – on several occasions my parents would be on the phone at breakfast time and I would be taken for an appointment on the way home from school. These days, ask any Scottish parent in need of an appointment for their child and if it’s not “an emergency” it can be weeks before they are seen. Being unable to get the advice of their GP must be intensely worryingly.
This isn’t the fault of our GPs or practice staff, there just aren’t enough of them to provide for our population.
I visited a GP practice in my constituency on Friday, after they got in touch to say that they had hit crisis point when, in one case, a GP racked up nearly 100 separate contacts with patients in a single day.
How we fix this mess starts with realistic politics. The Scottish Government need to be open and realistic about whether it will meet its target to recruit 800 new GPs by 2027. Experts like Audit Scotland have said that this is not on track. Scottish Liberal Democrats brought a package of measures to Parliament when we led a debate on this crisis last week. We pushed the government for a strategy to prevent staff burnout. Another part of the answer is to draw on the wider skills that exist in mental health, physiotherapy, pharmacy and more.
By putting more of these specialists into local teams we can lessen the load on GPs and get you fast access to the best care.
It will also be important to prioritise preventative medicine and early intervention that can keep people living well for longer, and ensure we can get the benefits of telehealth and all the monitoring of conditions that can be linked up to devices like your phone.
Most of all we need to make general practice a career of choice again. But we only achieve that by making the lives and workloads of our existing doctors easier in the here and now.