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Over-75s shouldnt have to sit in A&E for 9 hours because they cant get a GP appointment

Healthcare ● National by BigMalc1974 · 🏷️ 1. Concerned Citizen · Local · 5 months ago
16

My neighbour Frank is 81. Last month he had chest pains at 8am. He rang his GP at 8:00 on the dot, 8:01, 8:02, 8:03. By 8:20 he got through and was told there were no appointments left. The receptionist, who was very sorry, suggested he go to A&E if he was worried.

Frank got the bus to A&E. By himself. In march. With chest pains.

He waited nine and a half hours and saw a junior doctor who told him it was probably indigestion and sent him home at 6pm. He took another bus. He got back to his flat at half past seven and had a cup of tea and went to bed.

This is not A&E working as designed. A&E is meant to be for emergencies. Franks problem was that he couldnt get a GP appointment. That is a primary care failure, not an emergency care success.

What we need is this. Anyone over 75 gets a guaranteed same-day phone consultation with a GP, and if clinically necessary, a same-day in-person appointment. Not triaged to A&E. Not "try again tomorrow". A same-day route into primary care. If the local GP surgery cant deliver that, the funding goes to a community hub that can.

It is cheaper than A&E. It is better for patients. It is what the system used to do about fifteen years ago. Sometimes the answer really is to go back to how it was and stop pretending we have improved things by renaming them.

BigMalc1974 🏠 Borough Councillor Local

🏠 The Back to Basics Party

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Discussion (9)

Sign in to join the discussion. Debate and humour are both very welcome.

Poor Frank. The bit that gets me is he took a bus to A&E. Didn't ring an ambulance, didn't ring a neighbour, just quietly took himself like it was a minor inconvenience. That generation will take their low expectations to the grave and the rest of us will never understand what they put up with.
6
This is the actual effect of primary care cuts and it never makes the official stats because Frank didn't die. The measure of a functioning GP service isn't "people who died waiting", it's "people who took a bus to A&E in March at 81 years old". Guess which one gets tracked.
5
Common-sense preventative measure. Same-day access for the over-75s should be the floor, not an aspiration.
1
Frank's story is a system warning, not an outlier. Same-day GP access for the over-75s would prevent the cascade of A&E admissions that already costs the NHS a fortune.
1
Frank's story is depressingly familiar. Symptom of a wider neglect, the foundations of primary care left to crumble.
0
Poor Frank. 81, chest pains, taking a bus to A&E because the GP was unreachable. This is exactly what years of cuts produces, and the people paying the price didn't ask for any of it.
0
Bloody exhausted just reading about Frank's ordeal. Same-day GP access for the over-75s is basic. We used to do this before the cuts and reorganisations.
0
Same-day primary care for the over-75s is exactly the kind of preventative measure that pays for itself within months. The current pathway, wait, fail to get through, end up in A&E, is the most expensive option for everyone.
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Stop the waste and sort the GPs.
0

Mock the policy. Not the person. Community principles →