Sandstorm wrote: Thu Feb 13, 2025 9:53 am
dpedin wrote: Thu Feb 13, 2025 9:44 am
However the NHS, social care and many other services/industries in the SE would completely collapse without immigrants filling poorly paid jobs and those highly specialist jobs where there are national shortages ie NHS Consultants. In all seriousness it is a difficult choice ie no immigrants = even worse NHS services, no one to look after your Grannie in her care home or feed her at home, no barrista to pour your coffee and less workers in the factories. Your call!
The problem is GPs and dentists. They're lazy and/or over-subscribed with patients and this is exactly where Brits across the land see first-hand how stretched the NHS is. If Labour get GPs off their arses and stop bad conveyor-belt dentistry by managing these practises properly, instead of just focussing on "hospital waiting times..." then the public is happier, Farage voters go away and Reform is toast!
You'd also free up 1000s of hospital beds because GPs are actually seeing patients instead of offloading them onto the hospitals....
Interesting but unfortunately the data doesn't really support this.
According to published data GP Practices saw 29.8 million appointments in March 2024 compared with 24.2 million in March 2019 – an increase of 5.6 million (23.1%) in 5 years. I did some research on GPs a few years ago and the number of GPs is slightly up but with more female GPs who, for family reasons work part time, so overall GP WTE is broadly static. Also many don't want to take on GP partnership roles as these are too risky financially etc. Some practices cant now work on a financial basis so are either closing down, amalgamating or being taken over by private sector companies. Also the UK population is rising so that the patient load per wte GP is increasing, from 1938 patients per GP to 2264 over the last 10 years. Given our pop demographic the percentage of these are increasing elderly and more dependent on care etc. Also long term conditions - cardiac, orthopedics, COPD, etc - have increased and are being managed in the community. Finally a lot of acute care has already been shifted from secondary to primary care to take pressure off hospitals, diabetes, COPD for example, so the range of work done in GP practices has increased.
Dentistry is more complicated and is about the contractual situation they face, some would argue reflecting a desire by the last Gov to destroy NHS dentistry and force it into the private sector. For many dentists it is financially impossible for them to continue solely as an NHS provider, the contract would see many lose money hence they either take on a mix of private/NHS work or else more completely to private work. In essence the contract doesn't pay per 'item of work' but for an arbitrary unit of dental activity which doesn't reflect the actual work involved. For example a dentist might get paid the same for a simple filling on one patient as they do for multiple fillings and extractions over a number of appointments for another patient. It is worth looking it up to understand the problems of the contract and why we are where we are! Labour promised a new contract when they came into power but we are still waiting, meanwhile tooth extractions is now the leading cause for kids being given a general anaesthetic in hospital.
There will inevitably be a % of lazy or money grabbers in both GP and dentistry, as there is in every industry, however the accusation of laziness isn't really one borne out by the facts I'm afraid.
