Are GPs useless?

Firstly i'm sorry to hear that you are so ill, lifes tough and get to you more in that situation.

A lot of GP's will prescribe Anti depressants to people with life altering circumstance as the % of depression are higher.

You can find decent GP's they are hard to come by... my local doctors see's between 100-1000 patients a day and it's only a small centre, with so much to do and so many different thing to look for you have to cut them some slack, they will try the basics first then something different when you come back, then send out tests the third time and finally refer you to a specialist but only if they think you need it...


It all costs money and everyday they will have a few people out of the masses of "I've got a cold/ My stomache hurts" there will be someone who actually needs more than painkillers or flue tablets, these people have to wait as well, can you imagne the bill if everyone with a problem that the doctor wasnt 100% on wanted referring to a specialist .

I understand that your ill and the doctor should know it, but every GP will do the same set of tasks to make a analysis before giving you a treatment as we can't afford any other way.
 
Halfmad said:
You really should make sure that's correct before posting it here, do you have a source? As I can't find anything which states it anywhere near as high as that.
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Well I do know a little bit, my old man just retired as VP of one of the biggest pharma companies int he world.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthew...truly-staggering-cost-of-inventing-new-drugs/

But as Bernard Munos of the InnoThink Center for Research In Biomedical Innovation has noted, just adjusting that estimate for current failure rates results in an estimate of $4 billion in research dollars spent for every drug that is approved.
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The range of money spent is stunning. AstraZeneca has spent $12 billion in research money for every new drug approved, as much as the top-selling medicine ever generated in annual sales; Amgen spent just $3.7 billion. At $12 billion per drug, inventing medicines is a pretty unsustainable business. At $3.7 billion, you might just be able to make money (a new medicine can probably keep generating revenue for ten years; invent one a year at that rate and you’ll do well).
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delbuenno said:
If you re read my posts more carefully you will see I am not specifically blaming THIS government and funding is meerely ONE of the problems I state.

EDIT: What reasons do you think are to blame out of interest?
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I think the problem is structural. One monolithic entity which controls both health provision and health coverage. Compare with say the Scandanavian countries where health provision and funding is done at a more local level meaning that services can be more closely tailored to the health problems at that local level.

The larger an organisation gets the slower and harder it is to change anything, so when something doesn't work very well it tends to stay not working very well for a long time.

e: We also need to get rid of the "sacred cow" attitude to the NHS, where any change at all is seen as bad and needs to be stopped.
 
More importantly, not every drugs making company is efficient or doing good work, FOR SURE, with no question, many drug companies simply lie.

When a company is hugely funded by multiple world health organisations(well sales of drugs to them for hospitals) then its not really in their interest to say "hey, yeah, this drug cost us £38 to make, we're charging hospitals £38 a dose, lol".

It's not cheap but, firstly there is no hard and fast rule about how much a drug costs, it depends on so many factors as to be completely undefinable, how much research into one drug saves duplication of research on decades of future research into other drugs? Many drugs are "found" when looking for other drugs, many drugs are fund to have multiple uses, which means some new trials with a new goal and some minor tweaks and you often have a "new" patented drug for a different use at minimal cost.

The only thing you can be sure of is big pharma has very little reason to be truly honest about their costs.


As for the NHS, there are thousands upon thousands of excellent doctors, nurses, accountants, porters, managers and cleaning staff.

There are also thousand upon thousands of bad doctors, nurses, accountants, porters, managers and cleaning staff, like any business out there. One HUGE issue is the rules/over PC-ness/ridiculous procedures in public service for getting rid of **** staff. There are loads of **** people top to bottom you simply can't get rid of. Education IS getting worse, doctors aren't as good as they used to be, nurses aren't particularly highly paid, but still the highest paid nurses in the world afaik(last time I checked).

Cuts in the NHS are both needed, wanted and should continue to happen. There are so many wasted and bad staff you can cut millions and millions off the cost while increasing the quality of patient care. Of dozens of people, half family, half friends, who work in just about every department in the NHS every single one has dozens of stories of painfully incompetant staff at every single level.

The problem there is, if you have 100k pointless paper pushing staff pushed into the NHS as jobs are lost in industry, you create new paper work for them to do. The NHS almost needs to start from scratch, kill the overhead, all the brain dead idea's that get in the way of the good idea's, its patch over patch over patch over patch now.

Labour for a decade expanded the NHS and its spending while effecting the level of paperwork and non frontline staff more than increasing the quality of patient care, rolling it back is a massive task, it needs doing but it will end up being yet another patch over the existing framework. What we need is a new NHS, ground up.

The more complex a system gets, the more changes you make that because you can't account for every stupid little rule in every previous change, creates lots of overlap, the more you end up paying stupidly expensive management/accounting consultants to come in and find/fix problems.

We want a bare bones, stripped back NHS that is focused on front line service, with almost all the money, man power and time focused there with as minimal paperwork and backroom staff as possible. But that won't happen because we have two political parties more intent on winning elections and scoring points than simply working for a better country. Labour won't let conservatives fix the NHS, and conservatives won't let Labour fix it, and they won't work together so no one can claim credit, all they'll do is add some pointless department, fix the numbers and claim a win(while infact making it worse).
 
Van Hellseek said:
For the amount they get paid... I'd happily put up with it.
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Sure, you say that now, but see how you feel when dealing with moaners every day that's just in there wasting time or looking for attention.

You don't NEED to go the to the doctor if you have a common cold, unless it goes on for a prolonged period.

You don't NEED to go to the doctor because your foot hurts.

Or if you had a sudden cough fit two days ago and it still worries you.

Or your skin itches.

These are reasons I've heard people give for visiting a GP.

Surely you must understand GP's are humans and struggle to take serious if every second case that comes wobbling in there with baseless complaints are purely wasting time.
 
Edrof said:
Surely every doctor should expect this upon entering general practice.
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Maybe, maybe not. I have two cousins that's qualifying as doctors soon. It's a calling. They genuinely care about people and want to help. I wonder how long it's going to take for them to become 'useless' in the eyes of every moaning ape that's convinced he's dying and expecting GP's to chuck a few pills his way to keep him happy.

I have respect for GP's, oodles of respect since I couldn't do a job like that and take it serious after a while. And by the looks of it, a lot of them are struggling too.
 
Dr House said:
Are you really saying drugs should be sold for the cost of ingredients? if so your simply stupid and have no idea how the world works or your 12 years old.

Do you know the average cost of R&D for a new drug is about $4 to $5 billion per drug :rolleyes:
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Net ingredient cost is a term used in medicine to denote the net cost of a medication...
 
RDM said:
I think the problem is structural. One monolithic entity which controls both health provision and health coverage. Compare with say the Scandanavian countries where health provision and funding is done at a more local level meaning that services can be more closely tailored to the health problems at that local level.
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Yes, thats what they have been trying to do by dividing the NHS up into primary care trusts and introducing the likes of practice-based commisioning etc. Unfortunatey, as we have all seen, with one PCT going into administration and others merging back into larger trusts this on its own isn't working so far and it all seems to be becoming more centralised if anything. :(

RDM said:
We also need to get rid of the "sacred cow" attitude to the NHS, where any change at all is seen as bad and needs to be stopped.
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Again I agree but unfortunately the only changes we have seen at late are cuts in services, funding and staffing rather than any structural improvements and personally I don't believe pay cuts etc to the ground floor staff is the right way to do it but thats a whole different argument.
 
delbuenno said:
Again I agree but unfortunately the only changes we have seen at late are cuts in services, funding and staffing rather than any structural improvements and personally I don't believe pay cuts etc to the ground floor staff is the right way to do it but thats a whole different argument.
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Part of the problem is that the best place to cut for political reasons is front line staff. Cut there and people will notice, kick up a fuss and force a reverse of the cuts. Much like local councils, cut the most visible obvious stuff as that has the largest political impact.
 
A Friend my mine has a best friend who's a youngish GP, hes in his early 30's and this thread is completely true. The GP's just want to get people in and out as quick as possible and half of what they know can be treated by simply searching google.

The whole system is corrupt.
 
RDM said:
Part of the problem is that the best place to cut for political reasons is front line staff. Cut there and people will notice, kick up a fuss and force a reverse of the cuts. Much like local councils, cut the most visible obvious stuff as that has the largest political impact.
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Cutting frontline staff is political suicide, why do you think it rarely happens? I honestly don't see where you're coming from RDM. How often have frontline council staff been sacked? It's rare compared to salary reductions and back room staff being laid off.
 
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