Post

🧵/ The NHS is about to undergo one of the most radical – and scandalous - changes in its history. From 1st April (the public are the fools in this), GPs will be contractually obliged to seek remote “advice & guidance” from hospital clinicians, making it even harder to see an NHS specialist.

Does this sound part of a plan to genuinely ‘fix’ the NHS, as Wes Streeting vowed he would do when taking up office - or more like a tactic to ration hospital care by overriding GPs in order to massage the waiting list figures? It is, of course, the latter, an extra layer of bureaucracy...

..that at best will delay patients’ access to the specialist treatment they need, at worse sacrifice those patients on the altar of fake news about “falling” waiting lists. You don’t need me to point out the potential patient safety risks. We all know that time, in medicine, can be everything..

..The Royal College of GPs has been crystal clear: “The use of advice and guidance should not be mandated in any area… We have heard reports of risks of delays, with tests being required before any referral, lost messages and staff without appropriate senior clinical oversight handling requests.”..

..The aim, says the Times, is to reduce the number of hospital outpatient appointments by 30 million p/a. And the government, in a quite breathtaking example of political spin, is presenting this as “good” for patients - as though all those people who’ve been waiting months or even years..

..for the first Rheumatology, Neurology or Orthopaedics appointment they so desperately need are just, you know, malingering. (I recently spoke to a patient with a new diagnosis of multiple sclerosis who’d been waiting over six months to see a neurologist for the first time – simply scandalous.)..

Is there a good article for a lay person to read about this?

Here's an archive link to the Times article: archive.ph/1xGxl

The Times piece is linked above (but paywalled) but this one, though in the Mail, isn't - www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcar...