Exclusive NHS England’s primary care medical director has asked to meet with GP staff who faced a practice attack last week, to help ensure similar incidents do not happen again.
Dr Nikki Kanani added that NHS England recognises the ‘unprecedented contribution’ of general practices in ‘remaining there for patients’ during the pandemic.
In a personal message of ‘support and appreciation’ to the practice, seen by Pulse, Dr Kanani said that she ‘would welcome an opportunity to speak to the GPs and staff in a closed doors meeting’ either virtually or physically ‘if helpful’.
She added that she would like to ‘listen and understand your concerns and ensure that the steps we are taking nationally will ensure that such events do not happen in the future’.
Dr Kanani also thanked the team at Florence House Medical Practice in Openshaw for their ‘ongoing work under these difficult circumstances’ and in particular the staff and their families who were ‘caught up in the events on the day’.
She added that there is ‘no place for violence or aggression towards NHS staff’.
The email message said: ‘There is no reasonable excuse and under no circumstances does any individual working in the national, regional or local NHS accept that any individual’s anger should result in any form of physical or verbal assault on our staff.
‘We recognise the unprecedented contribution of local general practices in supporting patients through the pandemic and remaining there for your patients during these difficult and challenging times.’
NHS England has nationally ‘maintained daily contact’ with Manchester commissioners and its own regional team who ‘are supporting you with practical steps and will continue to ensure that you and your teams receive the support you need’, it added.
It also warned this week that a Daily Mail campaign for GPs to see patients face to face as the ‘default’ option risks further fuelling abuse and violence against practices.
A Pulse survey recently revealed that nearly three-quarters of GPs are experiencing increased levels of patient abuse compared with before the pandemic.
Meanwhile, grassroots GP organisation GP Survival has called on hospital colleagues to stop ‘perpetuating the myth’ that GPs are lazy and practices are closed.
READERS' COMMENTS [7]
Please note, only GPs are permitted to add comments to articles
Thank you for keeping your doors open and for getting assaulted. It will become increasingly useful to the Government to have this access available to the public, as we push forward our agenda of privatisation, scapegoating, corruption and inequality, and as the back-log and workforce demise becomes almost irreversible. Thank you.
Nothing like a motivational helpful positive e-mail, solves everything!!
Having just watched Grant Schapps on BBC Question Time tell the ironically socially distanced audience that we should be doing face to face on demand I suspect a few more fractured skulls will happen. Totally Fuckwit.
How did Pulse come by this letter? It was either shared by the practice, or by NK and her team.
If the latter (as I suspect it is), then its purpose is largely PR for NK. It doesn’t appear to serve any other worthwhile purpose – it’s just face-saving, meaningless PR guff.
What would be helpful on the other hand is a clear and unequivocal rebuttal of the DM and DT claims, which comes straight from the top of NHSE and carries NK’s signature.
So, why isn’t this happening?
Surely such a public statement is NK’s professional duty?
The press and other public claims are clearly nonsense (F2F when last measured was 56%, down from 80% pre-pandemic, and at a time when the pandemic is still raging with 40K new positive diagnoses a day and almost 200 deaths), and an expression of otherwise aimless anger and frustration. We have been set up as a straw-man to focus everyone’s frustrations on. There has been no comment about the evolving outpatient disaster, or the fact that most of these contacts are also now remote – why is that?
The irony is that the threatened respiratory virus winter surge – if it comes – will almost certainly cause the government to tell us to go back to mostly remote again.
Pulse – can you find out how the poor staff who were assaulted are, and if the two who were admitted to hospital have been discharged and are OK?
Also – why was this not all over the national press over the weekend? If an MP and their staff had been assaulted I suspect it would have been, and there would have been much talk and disapproval of the ‘climate of hate’ which led to it. Do we really need someone to die before NHSE defend us, and the press takes an interest?
Dr K : Does your mesage include there being no place for the DM and the DT in Britain now?