EXCLUSIVE: Bristol GP says lack of funding could cause devastating Winter
Doctor Lucy Pocock was recently forced to drive a patient to hospital herself because the ambulance service was so busy
A Bristol GP has slammed the government for not investing enough in healthcare, saying the NHS is staring down the barrel at a terrible winter.
In an exclusive interview with us Doctor Lucy Pocock has warned the system is so overwhelmed patients could end up dying in GP surgeries.
It comes after the BBC recently reported that one in four beds at Bristol's Southmead Hospital are taken up by patients who are fit enough to leave, but can't because they don't have adequate care in place outside.
We spoke to Dr Pocock after she shared a story online of waiting five hours for an ambulance for a six year-old patient, before giving up and driving the patient to hospital herself when it didn't arrive.
"I saw a patient who required a hospital admission," she said.
"The patient required oxygen so it wasn't appropriate for the parent to take the child to hospital themselves."
Two years ago, Dr Pocock tells us she would have expected an ambulance to arrive for such a case within half an hour.
Now though, she said she knew it would not be that quick.
"After three hours, nothing, and then it hit 9pm," she said.
"Nine o'clock is the time when our GP surgery is locked up by the security team.
"I'd been working since 8:30am that morning, I'd seen all my other patients for the day, I'd done all my admin, I'd been checking on the patient regularly who thankfully hadn't deteriorated, but it got to nine o'clock and we had a difficult decision to make."
At that point Dr Pocock chose to drive the patient to hospital herself, but pointed out she is not insured to do such a thing and so it was a big risk.
"It's not the care that any of us want to give patients and increasingly every day at work that's what we're doing now, is delivering care that's not of the quality we want to give just because we're so overwhelmed."
The Pressure on the NHS
Dr Pocock told us she wanted to make it clear her comments are in no way a criticism of the ambulance service.
She said she simply wants the public to understand the pressure the NHS is facing "so we can loudly and clearly tell the government that this is not ok".
"They have to put more in place," she said.
"They have to fund community services better and social care better so we can improve the flow of patients through the hospital."
What is the impact on health services?
In recent months and years GPs have come under fire from government and from the press, the suggestion being made that surgeries are busy because doctors do not work hard enough.
Recent plans from Downing Street to force GPs to increase the number of face-to-face appointments caused anger, with the boss of Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) Clinical Commissioning Group, Julia Ross calling it a "political load of nonsense".
The proposals put forward include naming and shaming practices that fail to improve access.
Dr Pocock agreed with Ms Ross that the perception is unfair.
"We're all exhausted," she said.
"There's a rhetoric in a lot of the media that GPs are somehow shirking their responsibilities and being lazy and not offering the appropriate appointments and I just think that couldn't be further from the truth.
"The reason people struggle to get access to their GP is because we are so busy.
"We've never been busier. We're offering more appointments now than we were two years ago, with less staff.
"We've had a shortage of GPs for many years. The government promised us 6,000 more GPs and actually we have less now than when they promised that."
A very difficult Winter ahead
last week, (3 November) during a special briefing with NHS officials in the South West we were told the health service could be overwhelmed this Winter by a deadly combination of coronavirus and flu.
During the hour long briefing, which you can read about here, we were told there could be 60,000 deaths from flu alone nationwide, which is as much as six times the usual number.
Hospitals across the country are already struggling to cope.
"We're worried, because nobody wants to be in a situation where they've got a deteriorating patient," Dr Pocock said.
"A GP surgery isn't equipped to cope with acutely unwell people, that's not what we do...
"There is a risk that people are going to start dying in GP surgeries."
What can be done?
The answer, according to Dr Pocock, is that primary care services like GP Surgeries and pharmacies must be better funded.
"Everybody always focusses on what's going in the hospitals and that's absolutely right, they're very busy and it's important we get that care right, but in order to protect the hospitals from getting overwhelmed, we need to look at the community," she told us.
"We know that 90 percent of patient contacts in the NHS happen in primary care, so you need to fund primary care properly.
"We see 90 percent of the patient contacts and we receive something like 11 percent of the NHS budget."
A lot of people, she said, would not need hospital treatment at all if there were better community services like district nurses, or rapid response teams that would enable patients to be given intravenous medication at home.
"At the other end the reason hospitals are struggling is because a quarter of their beds are being occupied by poor people who are waiting to go home but don't have any care available to be looked after at home, so they're stuck in hospital."
Dr Pocock is urging people to write to their MP demanding action, but also said people need to go back to wearing masks to bring Covid cases down and not call an ambulance unless in a life threatening emergency.