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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Interested to hear how ‘similar’ we are meant to be in consulting as compared with others countries. The difference being that in France GPs are paid per consultation, the patient has to hand over their ‘swipe card’ at the start of the consultation, which makes it seem so much more a ‘business’ (we in the NHS may find that distasteful). In addition the consultation slots are 30 minutes so that the GP is not rushed but rather has plenty of time to formulate differential diagnoses, quite a luxury. The end result I believe is more respect for GPs in France & possibly better (prophylactic anyway) patient care.
Conversely GPs earn about 1/3 what we in UK do. Patients can attend as many GPs as they wish to for several different opinions, which may result in several MRIs being requested (what safety to the patient, albeit nuclear magnetic exposure?). There is no such thing as a centralised patient record. And GPs don’t EVER do house-visits, if there is any emergency the patient has to phone the SAMUR (medical emergency paramedic service, not unlike those provided by the Fire Service in the USA). Meanwhile the French GP is enjoying a 2 hour lunch.
I spoke in May this year at Auvergne to the MMG (the equivalent of the General Practitioners Committee National Conference). They are IN AWE of the care that we provide in Scotland (but you could extrapolate much of that to care UK wide). I am proud to be associated with such care provision, but I didn’t have the heart to tell them that how we will fund such care in the future is perilously close to being a whole new ball game.
PS. I didn’t hear much said about the ‘need to shift focus from Secondary to Primary Care’ when I think about it!