‘Ten-minute appointments are an anachronism, doctors agree’.
No, they don’t. At least, this one doesn’t.
There are definitely patients I would not wish to spend more than 10 minutes with, for reasons of sanity, safety and the limitations of air freshener.
Besides, the welcome relief that is a pill check or sick note request would, in a world of 15-, 20- or even 30-minute appointments, leave me with useless fragments of redundant time – too long to spend retrieving debris from my keyboard crevices with an unbent paperclip, but not long enough for paperwork or a caffeine fix.
True, I can see where the BMA is coming from, and, on this occasion, I don’t mean a padded cell. Pitching for longer consultations is simply a way of supporting their argument to bolster our workforce. Fair enough.
On the other hand, ultimately it’ll backfire. As we move from 10 to 15 to 30 minutes, the Government will simply dream up more things for us to be ‘ideally placed for’, and they’ll be even more inane than the ones they’ve come up with already.
So we’ll still be hamsters madly running around, getting nowhere. It’ll simply be a bigger wheel.
Dr Tony Copperfield is a GP in Essex. You can email him attonycopperfield@hotmail.comand follow him on Twitter@DocCopperfield.
