Are you planning to read the party manifestos before the election? Have you ever done that? I haven’t. In fact, it was only two days ago that I learned of a promise from the Conservatives’ 2010 manifesto. I’m a step out of sync, like the old Two Ronnies’ Mastermind sketch.
Mind you, just as that sketch offered delayed but perfectly valid answers to questions (“What’s the name of the directory that lists members of the peerage?”, “A study of old fossils”), a glimpse of 2010 can enlighten thoughts about the issues of 2015.
“We will ensure,” the five-year-old Tory manifesto promised, “that every patient can access a GP in their area between 8am and 8pm seven days a week.”
How’s that working out? Well, I discovered the promise in a current story about how one in five people can’t fit around their GP’s restrictive appointment times.
My own doctors’ surgery, should I fail to schedule my illness for a convenient weekday slot, offers only recorded advice to dial 111.
But look again at the clever wording of the manifesto. “Access a GP” is a pretty elastic phrase. It could mean dialling 111. It could mean contacting a private GP. It doesn’t, technically, commit itself to the promise that your own free doctor will be contactable at weekends. It just sounded, in 2010, like it did. Cunning!
The question of GP access is not theoretical politics, to me; it makes me miserable every day. That’s because, every day, I move the words “Change GP?” from one to-do list to another, always aware that I won’t have time, don’t know how and it probably wouldn’t make any difference anyway.
I don’t go to the doctor much. My experience of the local surgery over the past few years has been: (1) Being told aged 35 that they’d no longer prescribe the contraceptive pill because I smoked and thus sat badly on the contraindications graph for heart attacks. I pleaded that, as an ageing gambler with a professional understanding of mathematical risk, I should be allowed to make that decision for myself – but no dice. So I gave up and got prescriptions privately at enormous expense.
(2) Phoning with an emergency illness at 10pm, to discover from their answering machine that it’s not the 1980s any more.
(3) Trying to change my address on their records, via two unanswered emails and three failed attempts to get through by phone in the daytime.
More recently, for potentially happy reasons connected to finally coming off the pill of my own volition, I needed a whooping cough vaccine. I thought under the circumstances it might be good to see a GP, for the first time in years, but the receptionist told me that was impossible unless I was actually ill and offered an appointment with the nurse three weeks later. Three weeks! For the nurse!
When the day came, the nurse was off sick and they postponed me for another fortnight. Thus, I now put “Change GP?” on my to-do list, sadly and pointlessly, every morning.
You can apparently get a same-day appointment if you call at 8am and satisfy the receptionist it’s an emergency. But the wisdom of that relies on a 100% crossover between those suffering a medical emergency and those who would describe something as a medical emergency.
Meanwhile, the national argument against “assisted dying” is that kindly old ladies would opt for death rather than be any trouble. Surely these same old ladies, if they exist, would never harangue a receptionist for an “emergency appointment”? You can’t have it both ways.
Me, I’m a libertarian about drugs. Contraceptives, Valium, recreational marijuana, I think informed adults should be able to take what they like – unless, as with antibiotics, they might actually damage the species along with themselves.
As for “assisted dying”, the idea that mankind has the capacity to let suffering people end their lives peacefully and quickly, but a cabal of doctors, judges and legislators deny access to that capacity, will, I suspect, make our great-grandchildren’s jaws drop. It seems insulting, high-handed and cruel.
So I’m a drug libertarian. However, I’m happy with an alternative world where GPs remain gatekeepers to pain relief, sedatives and so on, as long as those GPs are always accessible when needed – as they were in my childhood. That’s fine. Be there like a stern but hovering parent, or don’t be there at all. A middle ground where you need the doctor to test, prescribe or refer and yet you can’t get in to see that doctor, strikes me as a total balls-up.
This should be a massive issue for politicians because it’s all about money and everyone’s worried. My daily gloom on this issue is due to a fear and helplessness that millions share.
A failure to solve the issue of shrinking GP access is not just bad for our health and peace of mind, it’s bad for the harmony of communities which make migrants the scapegoats for this sort of thing. The suspicion that long waits are down to “too many people moving in” turns toxic and dangerous.
They aren’t, of course; the problem was that botched contract negotiation of 2004. If anything, the proven economic gain of immigration means there is more money to extend healthcare, if only it were spent properly, but the simultaneous increase of “foreign accents” in crowded waiting rooms makes paranoia spread faster than bacteria. So fear and helplessness become anger and resentment – misplaced but very real.
God, everything’s awful. Forget it. I’m never going to change GPs. There’s nothing to be done except watch the Two Ronnies’ Mastermind sketch again.
Go on: Google it now. I bet it makes you laugh out loud. And laughter is not just the best medicine, it might be the only kind you can get.