Sheffield Broad lane NHS GP City Surgery Health Walk in Centre Real Patient Experience
Local / NHS Jan 18, 2012 - 10:13 PM GMTBy: N_Walayat
One Medicare (owned by One Medical) with much fanfare and glossy leaflet drops opened Sheffield's GP Polyclinic or Super Surgery in April 2009 that offered 7 days per week access from 8am to 8pm, situated near the centre of Sheffield, located on the corner of Rockingham Street and Broad Lane. The centre allows any person to walk in off the street and see a GP or nurse without a prior appointment (allow approx 2hr waiting time) and those choosing to register with the surgery receive full NHS services, thus offering the potential for those stuck in Sheffield's worst ranking GP Surgeries to register with a better ranking and resourced GP surgery.
Parking - One of the drawbacks to the GP / health centre is that drivers will need to pay for parking, the nearby car park charges for Monday to Saturday 08:00 to 18:30 :
- Up to 1 Hours 85p
Up to 2 Hours £1.70
Up to 3 Hours £2.55
Up to 4 Hours £3.40
Up to 5 Hours £4.25
Up to 6 Hours £5.10
All Day £6.40
Motorcycles Free
Disabled Badge Holders Free
Sundays are free all day.
Review of Sheffield Broad lane GP Surgery Based on Real Patient Experience
In the surgeries first year of operation the Department of Health funded UK GP Survey results for 2009-10 showed that 95% of registered patients where satisfied at the overall quality of care received, ranking the surgery at 18th out of 92. However, patient satisfaction deteriorated significantly during the subsequent 12 months (2010-11) to rank the GP surgery at just 66th out of 92,(see table at end of article). The latest GP Survey results will be analysed and published shortly, which this review is in advance of as a summary of what patients can expect based on real experience of using the GP Surgery services as a registered patient for 6 months from mid 2011 onwards over a number of consultations as covered in greater detail in November 2011.
Arranging Appointments
- The surgery is easy to get through to on the phone and expect appointments to be available for 1 week in advance.
Waiting Time for pre booked appointments
- Expect to be kept waiting for upto 1 hour 20 minutes for a pre-booked GP Consultation appointment (way too long).
New Patient Health Checks
- Despite the glossy leaflets and website, No new patient health check, even if an appointment specifically for a health check is booked in person at reception then still the patient is likely to receive just an ordinary GP Consultation on their next visit.
- Quality of consultations is poor because the Surgery as personally experienced as a matter of routine dumps patients onto locum's (temporary GP's), as experienced in 2 out of 3 consultations. The flaw here is that these consultations can prove worthless, and have resulted in the locum stating that they are unable to deal with the patient symptoms and that they need to go and make another appointment with a regular GP, which the patient had already done so in the first place thus resulting in a wasted day and in having to wait for another week and associated 66% probability of being seen by another locum despite requesting to have an appointment with a regular GP.
Conclusion
This highlights the danger of letting the private sector contract for the NHS as without competition for patients between GP Surgeries then there is no incentive to deliver satisfactory GP or any other health services as monopolies will seek to maximise profits such as by cutting costs by contracting locum's.
Options for Patients
Patients should aim to register with GP practices that rank in the top 1/3rd of GP surgeries as per the UK GP Patient Survey so as to increase the probability of being in receipt of satisfactory GP services. However the flaw here is that GP practices operate as local monopolies that do not allow patients to register from outside of catchment areas, which means you will likely have to move house to register with a 'good' GP surgery, hence an example of the NHS post code lottery.
An alternative is to pay for private GP consultations and referral which could prove costly (especially the referral and resulting treatment) which would mean that patients are effectively being FORCED TO PAY TWICE FOR HEALHCARE. Also private medical insurance can turn out to be worthless in many cases given the multitude of small print get out clauses observed.
Flawed Government NHS Reforms
In terms of the big picture, the One Medicare experience highlights the problem at the root of the NHS that the governments reforms of letting private sector firms to take up GP practice delivery is the lack of a market for patients, and not for services. For if there is no real competition between surgeries for patients then the patient will NOT come first, no matter who is delivering the service.
Sheffield NHS GP Consortia's
The core at the heart of Coalition Government's NHS reforms is to scrap ALL NHS Primary Care Trusts (PCT's) to be replaced by competing GP Consortia's to directly manage patient treatment commissioning (the process could fully take 2 years to implement, subject to revisions).
Unfortunately whilst the aim is for better value for money by means of competing consortia's, the implementation is proving to be resulting in the exact opposite anti-competitive consortia's, as virtually all of the Sheffield NHS 92 GP Practices have signed up with one of of 4 geographically located GP Consortia's in advance of the implementation of the Coalition Governments NHS reforms.
- Central Sheffield Consortium
- HASC ( Hallam & South Consortium)
- North Sheffield Consortium for Health
- Sheffield West Consortium
The flaw in the construct of the consortia's is that there is nothing to suggest that the consortia's and GP surgeries will be competing for patients which therefore means the governments planned reforms will fail and patients could end up with even worse health services as GP surgeries will be wielding greater power within their geographic constructed Consortia's then they were able to wield under the city wide Primary Care Trust, therefore no competition in GP services will exist and the governments reforms are destined to fail just as badly as Labours 2002-2003 GP contracts failed as they sent annual GP pay rises soaring into the stratosphere, culminating in pay rises of more than 30% per annum.
NHS GP Doctors Putting Profit Before Patient Care, Channel 4 News Investigation
During 2011 a Channel 4 News investigation charged NHS Doctors with the subversion of the the coalitions governments NHS reforms to result in NHS doctors pocketing all of the cash saved as a consequence of the NHS reforms, which matches my own analysis of a year earlier that the Coalition Governments proposed reforms were fatally flawed in that they allowed GP's to profit from patient care.
"Your doctor making a profit out of your health care, your GP Sending you to a clinic that he or she owns shares in, we are seeing the biggest shake up of the NHS in its history, Channel 4 news can reveal tonight that there is nothing on the legislation currently before parliament to prevent the outcome no one wants, doctors putting profit before the care of patients, in our special report tonight we show how the new arrangements will create fundamental conflicts of interest potentially harming the trust at the very heart of the doctor patient relationship". Channel 4 News
Channel 4 News investigation key points:
- Serious flaws in the Governments NHS reforms legislation, it's failure to protect patients against fundamental conflicts of interest, it allows GP's to put profit before patient care.
- All of the monies saved will go into the pockets of NHS GP's and doctors.
- GP's during patient consultations factoring in the profit they will make on their diagnoses.
- GP's referrals on the basis of how much commission they will earn from the heath institution.
- GP referrals to health clinics that the GP's own shares in.
- New private health clinics being set up with a view to making profits so that they can floated onto the stock market at huge profit for share holding GP's
- GP's get access to dip their hands into the annual £80 billion pot of money meant for patient care.
- GP's draw up the rules themselves on the conflict of interest, akin to writing 100 times, "I promise, I will not fiddle the patients"
Under the previous Labour government patients were treated as credit cards to swipe in and out of door ways as fast as possible to maximise profits. Under the Coalition government patients will now become cash cows to milk to the fullest extent possible, what's best for the health of patients won't even factor into the thought process during GP consultations - "If I send Patient X to Clinic Y for Operation Z, my consortia will earn a commission of £2,000".
The NHS Health Credit Card Solution
The NHS post code lottery which excludes millions from the best health care on offer can only be ended if there is real patient choice, not only for GP's but also hospitals and other health institutions right across the country where treatment is sought which requires real reform of the whole NHS health care system from diagnosis to treatment of all patients . An important element would be to place the power to purchase healthcare into the hands of the patients by means of an NHS Health Credit Card system, that enables patients to purchase health services from any GP practice or hospital regardless of whether it falls under the NHS umbrella or is fully private, so that both patients and health practitioners would be fully aware of the financial transaction involved in the purchase of the health service, which is set against the current system where patients are made to feel that they may be wasting the GP's time so are easily put off by the practiced dismissive attitude of most GP's during initial consultations, which means the medical condition of patients reaches a far more serious state and this proved more costly for the NHS to treat.
Patients would have a choice of covered core treatments for illnesses or injuries, where they would have the option of paying to top up treatments with their own money depending on the institution that they seek to purchase treatment from, or for other extra's including IVF etc. This would have the effect of reducing the cost of the NHS whilst introducing greater efficiency into the NHS as the majority of patients would only choose those health service institutions that are ranked as delivering a good service. The NHS Health credit card would revolutionise the way healthcare is delivered in the UK, much as supermarkets revolutionised food delivery and choice during the 1980's, as heath supermarkets would spring up all across the country that would maximise efficiency and standardise quality of service delivery as they competed to offer a wider range of health services than anything a bureaucratic top down health care system could ever hope to provide.
The health care credit card system could be further enhanced by workers directly contributing to their health care plans that they can claim upon to purchase 'extra' services at a later date, much as workers today contribute into private pension schemes.
The impact of this would be to greatly REDUCE the cost to taxpayers whilst at the same time delivering better health services, a win, win outcome for the people of Britain as opposed the current system of an out of control unproductive £120 billion National Health Service that attempts to mask failure to deliver with phony statistics and propaganda of a "free for all service" that does not match real patient experience.
Results For All 92 Sheffield GP Surgeries Ranked in Order of Patient Overall Satisfaction With Care Received
Data Source - http://results.gp-patient.co.uk/report/main.aspx
Source and Comments: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article32703.html
By Nadeem Walayat
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Nadeem Walayat has over 25 years experience of trading derivatives, portfolio management and analysing the financial markets, including one of few who both anticipated and Beat the 1987 Crash. Nadeem's forward looking analysis focuses on UK inflation, economy, interest rates and housing market. He is the author of three ebook's - The Inflation Mega-Trend; The Interest Rate Mega-Trend and The Stocks Stealth Bull Market Update 2011 that can be downloaded for Free.
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