Wes Streeting is living in a fantasy land – but GPs will send him crashing to earth

I have said this before, but I have to say it again so that we do not forget the exemplary nature by which family doctors used to attend to their patients. 
 
That is the way it was when my father was a GP during the 1980s and 90s, he would lift the phone from the surgery, come home and my mother, brothers and I used to take turns answering the out of hours calls. Back in the early days, patients were so courteous to their GP that most of them would only seek an audiences with my father in cases of dire emergencies. 
 
Thus would Dad set off, for his at–home patients who needed him at any time, including the early hours of the morning armed only with his black doctor’s bag. He sometimes did more than 60 hours a week, let alone the regular 5 and a half days a week. He would not even have contemplated going on a strike. We now find out the BMA is gearing up for more strikes and around 8 thousand five hundred GPs have supported it. 
Some will limit the number of patients they attend to, and this will imply that patients will be rejected by surgeries. This disruption is likely to paralyse the already struggling NHS , hence the stand still term that has been used. 
 
As a backdrop to examination and analysis of GPs’ course content, it is useful to consider what world they are living in as the following pages reveal? This change in the gp contract introduced by tonier Blair zerobilled family doctors a 60,000 pounds a year pay rise for them not to work at night and during the weekend. Currently GPs are whining that they are overworked – mainly because significantly a smaller amount of them indeed are open full time (only 33%, as opposed to almost 40% five many years ago). 
 
Therefore, the absolute number of full-time hours delivered by GPs has not increased despite having more GPs, 16,400 currently compared to 12,500 in 2019, actually lessening the efficiency of services provided. The end product of this scenario is that the people of Britain are excluded from the service rendered by the GPs and the inevitable, catastrophic outcome that such a situation has received. 
 
And to top it all, while patients are finding it very hard to book appointments, the BMA is attempting to bring in work-to-rule that would confine daily patient contacts to a “safe maximum of 25”. They have surely been encouraged to do this by the manner in which Labour quickly surrendered to demands of the junior doctors for a 22. Call for 3 per cent pay rise. 
 
Wes Streeting becomes the Labour Health Secretary, and he imagines cutting the backslog to use evening and weekend appointments. He may soon come to realise that this will never be achieved if GPs are backward in accepting to work the hours my father used to.