Susan Hill Susan Hill

NHS GPs should charge for appointments. Here’s why

A dose of stiff upper lip – and a small fee – would soon ease the queues at GPs’ surgeries

The Chairman of the Royal College of GPs recently said that ‘general practice has radically altered over the last five years, with ballooning workloads and more and more patient consultations having to be crammed into an ever-expanding working day.’

The blame for this tends to be put on a growing and ageing population or an ever-increasing range of ailments. It might also be put on the last Labour government for changing the way in which GPs work, by rewarding them for preventing, not just treating, illness.

Whatever the cause, the solutions are more numerous and often ineffective. NHS Direct is for the most part staffed by poorly trained non-medics who regularly tell people to go to hospital for fear of being sued if the caller dies. Meanwhile, many doctors I have talked to have complained bitterly about the proliferation of forms to be filled in, staff assessments, diversity checks and all the other management — rather than medical — issues which clog their day. A certain amount of admin is inevitable, but they protest that they are doctors, not accountants.

The system may not be at breaking point but it is clearly strained. If doctors, nurses and management cannot do anything more to ease that strain, who can?

We can. The patients.

Those of us old enough to remember the early days of the NHS may also remember how remarkable it seemed to have all treatment ‘free at the point of delivery’. Because my parents were used to paying when they went to see the doctor, they did so only when it was essential, and that attitude carried over into the new days of free medical treatment. We did not waste the doctor’s time.

My mother was so anxious not to do so that she failed to report early enough a symptom which she thought trivial, but which was actually an early sign of the cancer from which she died.

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