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Understanding pressures in general practice
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Part of Pressures in general practice
This content relates to the following topics:
Part of Pressures in general practice
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What about the rest of us who have to work on minimum wage jobs and have our mental health affected? GP's should stick up for us too and I blame primarily Psychiatry and Psychology which are total frauds and forms of social control to uphold and justify the unequal capitalist mode of production. Did you know psychiatrists use to label black slaves with "drapetomania" because they wanted to flee captivity in the 19th century. Today if you can't handle the stress of working for the minimum wage, being constantly tested or bullied at school or any other social problem then you get labelled with a mental illness and drugged to the eyeballs to keep you quiet while the other slaves work for nothing, or immigrants do the job.
This is why people are labelled with a mental illness, their personality is incompatible with our heartless exploitative capitalist environment and rather than change the environment to meet your needs YOU have to change. Because people with mental illness can't change psychiatrists need to do research in to why and how you can change in the future but all they need to do is accept that our environment is the cause of peoples misery and change the environment.
Well if it's that simple why don't they change the social environment? Because our environment is based on inequality, someone become rich and someone becomes poor, the minimum wage goes up then so do your bills and food so you're always stuck in poverty. If they give people with Autism and ADHD a job in the community and help it goes against the principles of our capitalist environment which isn't about help and caring for each other. Then there's another problem, if they give a job and help to people with Autism what about all the people who have depression because of their low paid jobs, people in prison with mental illness who need help and everyone else. The capitalist system would collapse so it's imperative that people with mental illness are dependent on mental health services which creates jobs for psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and neuroscience research teams. They uphold and justify the capitalist mode of production which is why after 200 years of psychiatric research suicide is on the increase and they can't even diagnose properly like real medicine does.
At the moment the whole premise behind psychiatry is that if you're mentally ill its due to a biological problem like a brain disease which is a lie. This means society can carry on screwing people over and making them ill because if it's a brain problem then nothing needs to change and those who do thrive in this environment will continue to do so. Most of the illnesses in the DSM are voted into existence by the American Psychiatric Association, none are discovered in the laboratory. In fact most mental illnesses are diagnosed through an interview. Can you imagine a normal doctor giving someone insulin, chemotherapy, drugs to treat cancer etc on the basis of an interview? If I'm going to have chemotherapy or be put on a life long drug treatment plan then I want a test to prove it especially when psychiatric drugs can causes liver, kidney damage and other health problems.
But isn't capitalism the best social environment? Well for some people it might be like a business man but because different environments effect different people differently it doesn't work for everyone. Also we're told at school to think about ourselves, get good grades, go to Uni and get a good job but we don't look over our shoulder to see how these stresses affect other people. We're not told that it's an unequal exploitative, capitalist system where employers mainly care about money and will screw you over. In Business Studies we are taught about the differences between sole trader, partnerships and limited companies when discussing business but we are conveniently kept in the dark about the dark side of business.
What do you mean? Take the slave trade for example, slavery expanded to satisfy European consumers and enrich merchants and bankers. in the 1700's the British were the main consumers of these goods. ports like Liverpool and Bristol became rich during the slave trade and lots of people depended on it including boat builders, sail makers, rope makers, carpenters, sailors and shopkeepers who sold the products. Slavery was seen as normal and even shopkeepers with savings to invest would finance slave voyages and the economy would boom. Sir Francis Baring founder of Barings Bank was one of the many bankers in the city of London who made fortunes out of the investments in the slave voyages without seeing any of the suffering inflicted on the Africans. Lloyds of London ( the insurer) has its roots in the slave trade. It was founded by Edward Lloyd in the 17th century in Tower Street and became a major insurer of slave ships during the Atlantic slave trade. it was originally called Lloyds Coffee House.
A bronze statue on a pedestal of Portland stone was unveiled in Bristol city centre (in 1895) showing a deep thinking Edward Colton leaning on a stick, its inscription reads "Erected by the citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city". Not mentioned are the thousands of slave victims that Colston and his family trampled over to obtain much of their wealth.
Ok but slavery ended now business is a good thing? No business exists to make money and screw you over that's why there's always been a conflict between employer and employee, like in 1823 The Master & Servants Act was a law which required obedience and loyalty from the workers to their contracted employer, with punishment enforced by jail or hard labour. It was used against workers organizing for better working conditions until the Trade Union Act of 1871 was implemented and secured the legal status of Trade Unions. Even today workers go on strike asking for better pay and conditions because their employers are taking advantage of them. Also think about all the cheap clothes and products we can buy, somebody somewhere must be getting screwed over. In April 2013 an eight storey building the Rana Plaza collapsed in Savar in Bangladesh, over 900 people died. The building contained clothing factories for companies like Benetton, Primark and Monsoon. The workers were worried about the state of the building because cracks appeared in the walls but they were forced to return to work and threatened with loss of pay if they didn't. It doesn't end there there's also corruption.
What do you mean about corruption? Well business exists to make money and that's all they care about. Take Libor for example (the global benchmark for interest rates) was manipulated during the financial crisis of 2007 so Banks could carry on doing business. Also in 2012 an investigation by the US authorities found that HSBC the UK Bank was failing to stop criminals using the banking system. Mexican drug traffickers like the Sinaloa Narco Cartel laundered hundreds of millions of dollars with the bank. The New York Times reported that Federal Authorities would not prosecute HSBC in case a criminal prosecution would topple the entire capitalist system.
If you're a GP please look up "psychiatry fraud" on You Tube and do some of your own research on internet, please help blow the whistle because it's not only GPs mental health which is affected but your patients too
We have developed an effective primary care service that works with complexity but importantly also supports GPs with case discussion, group supervision and joint consultation. With so much unknown about Medically Unexplained conditions and Somatic disorders we have to work together and pool training and experience with Primary Care MH input so that individual GPs are not left feeling impotent in the face of underlying social and psychological determinants and their ills. Sharing clinical dilemmas helps avoid ‘fundamentalist’ or overly rigid thinking and tactics in the face of such huge anxieties about our system of care and its apparent dismantling. Well done & thanks to all at the Kings Fund.
We, in care home land, hugely value our excellent support to our older folk in 24/7 care living with complex care needs.
We are all feeling anxious about H&SC integration and the squeeze on resources. Lots of GPs retiring in the not too distant future and inadequate succession planning. Only 11% planning to work full time after 5 yrs post qualification is a very scary prospect
Our real results from 30 practices match the data here. There has been a massive rise in activity over the last 10 years that needs explaining. Attendance rates per person are going up. While some of this is perhaps explainable by an ageing population - I believe that health seeking behaviour has fundamentally changed - whether it’s a combination of "present early in case its cancer", a believe that "medicine can cure all ills", a workplace culture that frowns on time off for illness, or a dumping of work from secondary care to primary care, I'm not sure. But its real.
What Apex is showing us is that our practices are at capacity – that practices are having to switch to telephone based consultations which on the whole are slightly quicker to increase the volume of people they can deal with in a day yet a lot of patient’s satisfaction with telephone calls isn’t as great despite the media hype for skype and the like. Locally what our data is showing is that alternative practitioners are increasingly being used as first point of contact – I’m not suggesting there is anything wrong with this – though some of my colleagues do. Physios, Pharmacists, Counsellors, Third sector travel agents are all being used.
The interesting thing is for this to work – effective triage on first contact needs to be made to direct people to the right service without them needing an appointment. Some IT systems are developing to deliver this, however some patients need to get used to the idea of being asked why they want an appointment so we can offer them the right service – not the one they think they want.
Apex is also allowing our practices to identify their future capacity compared to their predicted demand to identify pressure and pinch points – of course that doesn’t mean they can do anything about them – locums are scarce, job adverts go unfilled. Finally, Apex is hopefully going to allow us to identify the effect of interventions. We are speaking to iPlato around some innovative PROMS work (patient reported outcomes) where instead of being called back for follow up appointments, patients can report their condition via an app saving time and freeing up capacity and Apex should allow us to monitor this.
I have never seen such a crisis as this in the my thirty years of NHS work. Surgeries around us are closing or at severe risk thanks to financial and workload pressures. We have had to diversify to survive.
GPs have only seven minutes of face to face time in a ten minute consultation to address multiple issues often leaving a minute or two for each problem. (see http://docrick.co.uk/consultations/seven-min-consultation/ )
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