“GPs must bring back face to face consultations with their patients. We need to get back to our workplaces.” Jacob Rees-Mogg said that in Parliament being unaware, along with our Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Health and Social Care that surgeries have been seeing patients face to face since the pandemic began.
It is frustrating as before the pandemic, it would be common to be sitting next to someone in the doctors waiting room who had a viral respiratory tract infection. Just before the first lockdown, many GP’s moved to a system of triage by telephone before seeing patients and this recommended by medical institutions. Patients continued to be seen, but what could be dealt with by telephone was dealt with by telephone.
In the surgery I work in, much more face to face activity is taking place, but people still slip through the net, coming into the surgery with symptoms of infections. Staff are now vaccinated and social distancing takes place, putting them at far less risk compared to last year. However there is a risk to them still, and more importantly to other patients.
With the waiting rooms kept quiet, the risks posed to other patients is reduced (at our surgery, we see suspected respiratory tract infections in our hot room). If general practice is opened up to the levels seen before the pandemic, in the same manner, then more people will catch infections in the waiting rooms, and of those, some will be COVID19, and of those, some will die when they would not have if the triage system was in place,
Sadly, the Conservatives forget the pressure that Primary Care was under before the pandemic, let alone the increased pressures it faces now. They did promise to recruit more GP's in 2015, and failed.
So when Jacob Rees-Mogg speaks about GP’s seeing patients on a face to face basis, he either is unaware that this never stopped, or that he wants waiting rooms full of ill patients infecting each other.
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