Friday, February 29, 2008
Daytime GP visits cost £33 per worker
51 million patients are happy with GP opening hours!*
So the main pressure for extended GP opening is coming from the CBI.
It is the CBI's members who are making it difficult for workers to take time off to see their GP during office hours.
The figure trotted out in media stories is that lack of extended opening is 'costing' the British economy £1 billion per year.
But, since there are 30 million working people in the UK, that's works out at a paltry £33 per year for each worker.
And it's a false cost anyway, because you can't simply eliminate health care costs - extended hours clinics cost at least 50% more than daytime one.
Another piece of classic New Goebbels propoganda.
* Using the New Labour technique of expanding the result of a survey to the entire UK population - 85% of patients are happy with GP opening hours.
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3 comments:
Has anyone thought that if we bow to this politically inspired nonsense then all employers will expect employees to make sure they can ONLY visit the doctor outside their working hours? This is the thin edge of a very thick wedge. For those of you who don't mind going back to pre-contract days on-call where you have wankers waking you up at 3 in the morning because they cant sleep please vote option A and make sure Laurence gets his gong!
The CBI are just pawns in the nulabor Murdochracy in which we now live.
Industrial action by GPs is the only way forward but it needs to be stuff that doesnt harm our relationship with patients:
1 on April 1st that card comes out of my computer - NO MORE choose and book;
2 BIG poster going up in waiting room advising all my patients to opt out of the spine. Those that dont see it will be advised opportunistically. May even batch add the code to the Practice population. This will then allow us to demonstrate to our patients that McClunkjaws lot have wasted £20 billion on a system that is completely redundant. Please spread the ideas.
The most efficient health service in the world is in Japan. There, insurers and government support hospital and elder care, but GPs are all private. If you want to see a GP, you pay 20 quid.
So GPs are just like any other shops in Asia. They open at 11 in the morning and close at 8 at night. It works fine. Most big office buildings have a practice; so do even small villages. Doctors don't starve: average GP earnings in 2000 were 85K when UK quacks were earning 60.
Oh, and the Japanese live longer than anybody else despite spending less on healthcare than any other OECD country.
I fucking hate the CBI. They're forever whining about "sick leave costs us x" (where x is a miniscule fraction of what they get back from unpaid overtime) or "we want schools to and universities to train workers for us (rather than educating them) so we don't have to pay". They moan about what little tax is ever extracted from them while simultaneously demanding more handouts from the government. Fuckers.
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