On the day before the general election 2015 and Pulse’s exclusive, which found the unaddressed GP workforce crisis could leave average GP waiting times at two weeks by next year, has been covered across the national media.
This includes a front page in the Daily Mail, which carries GPs’ warnings that the current workload will lead to serious illness being missed, and in the Telegraph where GP leaders are casting doubt on the political parties plans to improve recruitment.
Dr Richard Vautrey said: ‘None of the parties are really coming forward with any credible solutions for recruiting new GPs and making general practice attractive to young doctors.’
The Guardian reports that an NHS consultant cardiologist has called for doctors to be prevented from working privately and while holding an NHS position, because it damages the health service and creates ethical problems.
Dr John Dean, writing in the BMJ today, has given up private practise and says it involves the ‘greedy preying on the needy’ and invites doctors to compromise their ethics by creating a financial incentive to recommend unnecessary treatment.
He states: ‘No matter how high I set my own moral and ethical standards I could not escape the fact that I was involved in a business where the conduct of some was so venal it bordered on criminal – the greedy preying on the needy.’
And finally, a potential new treatment for minimising the risk of repeat bacterial infections after a course of antibiotics could be to inoculate patients with a non-pathogenic form of the same bacteria.
The BBC reports that researchers, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, introduced non-toxin producing form of the common infectious bacteria Clostridium difficile to patients in 173 trials.
They found that 69% of the time the harmless bacteria spread throughout the gut, and just one in 50 of these patients faced a repeat infection. Where the harmless bacteria didn’t take hold, one in three people had renewed symptoms.
