A huge majority of GPs believe their work is in crisis and close to half say they cannot guarantee safe care, Sky News reported over the weekend. A poll of 258 GPs by the RCGP showed 49% felt under too much pressure to promise safe care.
The survey found the profession was suffering huge workloads because of longer surgery opening hours and caring for an ageing population, with some dealing with up to 60 patients a day.
Professor Clare Gerada, chair of the RCGP, said: ‘It is now no longer at the tipping point. It has actually gone over the tipping point. Unless we do something about it, I’m afraid GPs will not be able to deliver safe patient care, and therefore the NHS will become unsustainable.’
The CQC is going to make GPs and hospital wards put up eight ‘commandments of care’ on the walls of their surgeries as part of a radical new overhaul of standards, reports The Telegraph this morning.
The commandments will be displayed in every hospital ward and GP surgery to ensure patients are treated properly. They include things like ‘I will be cared for in a clean environment’ and the CQC was due to announce that health bosses will be sacked, hospitals taken over of units shut down if the new charter was breached consistently. The new charter follows the Francis report into care failings at Mid Staffordshire hospital.
Also in The Telegraph, researchers from University College London believe they may have solved the puzzle of how cancers spread throughout the body.
Using frog and zebrafish embryos, the scientists identified a mechanism called ‘chase and run’ which showed how diseased and healthy cells follow each other around the body.
‘Nobody knew how this happened, and now we believe we have uncovered it. If that is the case it will be relatively easy to develop drugs that interfere with this interaction,’ said Professor Roberto Mayor, who led the team.
