I couldn’t stop laughing earlier, when I was looking up the postcode for the Chadwell Heath office and these Google reviews came up.
“If you plan on accessing GP services, register elsewhere.” 😂😩
(Yeah, previous experiences with the original location made me sorry to see they’d taken over that other practice when I really needed to find another doctor. No wonder they were accepting new patients, both times…)
The decision comes after the NHS made an undisclosed settlement to Virgin Care when it sued a group of NHS bodies in Surrey following its failure to clinch a county-wide children’s services contract worth £85m.
The UK’s largest hearing loss charity Action on Hearing Loss is urging the 9 million people in England who are deaf or have hearing loss to tell their GP what support they need to help them communicate.
The call to the public comes as the charity launches its new campaign, ‘On the Record’, just under three weeks before the NHS England’s mandatory Accessible Information Standard comes into full force.
The charity’s Access All Areas research found that most people with hearing loss surveyed were forced to struggle with the phone or go in person to book appointments for lack of other options such as online booking. One in seven had missed an appointment because they hadn’t heard their name called out in the waiting room. Furthermore, more than a quarter had said they didn’t understand their diagnosis after seeing their GP, and two thirds of those needing a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter didn’t get one.
NHS England estimates that missed appointments for people with all levels of hearing loss costs the NHS at least £14 million every year.
Dr Roger Wicks, Director of Policy and Campaigns at Action on Hearing Loss, said: “This is a huge step forward for people who are deaf or have a hearing loss. From simply booking appointments to fully understanding what has been said in the consulting room, many have struggled to enjoy full, equal access to healthcare.
“This Standard now means that the 9 million people in England who are deaf or have hearing loss must be provided with the support they need to communicate when they visit the GP or other NHS services. We urge anyone who hasn’t had their needs recorded to use one of our free resources to contact their GP and make their needs known.”
The Standard, which becomes a legal requirement in England by 31st Jul 2016, establishes a clear administrative process for providers of NHS care or publicly funded adult social care to follow to make sure people with disabilities and sensory loss can contact services when they need to, communicate well during appointments and understand information they are given.
The charity has created a template letter for patients to send to their GP practice manager or a card for patients to give to the receptionist the next time they’re at the surgery. Patients can use one of these two resources to explain what support they need.
To find about more about how the Accessible Information Standard will affect you, and to download the template letter or card, please visit: www.actiononhearingloss.org.uk/ontherecord. All information on the Standard and how to use the template letter are available in BSL on the page.
Very relevant. Hopefully this will make some difference, with their at least having to look like they’re doing something about accessibility.
(And I must add that the DDA went through in 1995, and that describes the state of accessibility for NHS services over 20 years later. I don’t necessarily expect much, but you can bet I am sending a letter to the GP’s. Where I have not been able to make an appointment for quite a while.)
Reminded of this again. Because they are threatening me with loss of treatment for freaking retinopathy and maybe going blind, largely because I am already HOH and otherwise disabled.
(I also developed that complication already largely thanks to inaccessible and just plain bad care, but I don’t need to go on right now.)
And the state-run health system has largely avoided even pretending to follow equalities legislation for over 20 years. Because the system places that much value on disabled people. Simple appointment booking is the least of it, but still a major hurdle.
Then they keep blaming us for draining the system with missed appointments. When we’re too often not treated as worth providing decent care.
Not even able to add much right now. (Other than that I did, indeed, get dropped from ophthalmology services recently for having to reschedule too many times, while sick and without the support needed.)
Exclusive: Senior health professionals and campaigners have now come together to take legal action and demand a judicial review
Jeremy Hunt is the longest serving health secretary Getty
Legal action is being taken against Jeremy Hunt and the Department of Health over their proposals to restructure the NHS, The Independent can reveal.
Plans have been tabled to convert the NHS into a public/private enterprise, which critics say is based upon the US private health insurance-based system.
Senior health professionals and campaigners have now come together to
take legal action and demand a judicial review, to ensure full
parliamentary scrutiny of the proposals.
Under NHS England’s new plans, the boundary between health and social
care would be dissolved and new systems and structures would allow
alternative funding sources, ultimately leading to the creation of new
healthcare overseers called Accountable Care Organisations (ACOs).
ACOs would permit commercial, non-NHS bodies to run health and social
services. They could be awarded huge contracts to manage and provide
whole packages of care, allowing the ACOs to either provide the NHS
service themselves or sub-contract it.
This means ACOs will have control over the allocation of NHS and
taxpayers’ money but their accountability for spending it and their
obligations to the public will be under commercial contracts, not
government statutes.
Solicitors representing prominent NHS campaigners have now contacted
Mr Hunt to inform him that they are seeking a judicial review in an
attempt to ensure parliament can fully scrutinise the proposals.
They claim the Department of Health’s consultation process was
limited, inadequate and unlawful due to the lack of national
consultation or parliamentary approval…..
This is an area where I see even disabled people getting confused. Like, even when we know deep down somewhere in our gut that it’s vastly wrong and dangerous, we don’t always have answers when people say these things to us, and that can cause us to doubt whether we actually have a good reason for our viewpoints or not.
I can’t count – can’t even begin to count – the number of times I’ve heard “there’s too few resources to go around” used to justify ableism. Used to justify tons of other things, too, but at least people fighting those other things tend to have come up with answers to it. Disabled people haven’t, always, even when we know instinctively that something isn’t right with what we’re being told to believe.
So it runs something like this:
“You say it’s wrong to deny someone a lung transplant because they’re autistic. But there aren’t enough lungs to go around. Surely we have to choose somehow!”
“Isn’t it a waste of resources to keep Americans alive on respirators and with feeding tubes when some people in some countries can’t even afford the basics?”
Well. No. And I can finally articulate why.
Take the organ transplant thing.
Yes, there is a horrible, horrible shortage of organs, for all kinds of reasons, some of which are solvable and some which may never be, depending on a lot of complicated stuff. But regardless of why there’s too few organs to meet the need, there really are too few, they’re a limited resource and not everyone who needs an organ is going to be able to get it even if we believe every last one of them should get a chance at transplant.
(This isn’t theoretical to me. I have bronchiectasis. It’s mild enough I’ll likely never need a transplant, but bronchiectasis that gets severe enough can result in people being on the transplant list. If that happens to me, I hold very little hope for getting a transplant.)
So.
The question these people aren’t asking.
Basically… certain kinds of disabled people are denied organ transplants for purely ableist reasons that have to do with the idea that our lives fundamentally have less value or less quality of life – automatically – than other kinds of disabled people. (I can’t really call anyone sick enough to need a transplant nondisabled.).
But even after you remove all the disabled people where the issue is 100% ableism preventing transplant from being seen as okay or viable. And even if you grant that there may sometimes be medical issues that render a transplant a bad idea compared to someone else (although that’s a slippery slope and there has to be a huge amount of caution even in seemingly clear-cut situations, because often what seems clear-cut can have deadly levels of hidden bias riddled all through it). You eliminate all those people? There’s still not enough organs to go around.
And yet, once you’ve got the people who actually make the transplant list, there at some point has to be stuff that’s just left entirely to chance and other factors, rather than the doctors picking and choosing who is more deserving, more viable, etc.
So like, why is it automatically assumed to be okay to use certain kinds of disability to narrow down your transplant list, when other kinds of disability can’t be used, and other factors can’t be used? (At least not officially.)
And the only real answer to that question that makes any sense is, “Because this isn’t about what’s better for people medically, it’s about some people being automatically considered more worthy of life than others, some people’s lives being automatically considered more worthy of throwing loads of resources into than others, and it’s completely unethical to use such assumptions to make choices about who lives and dies in a situation like this.”
Like, let’s say there’s 100 people who need a particular organ, 20 of them have disabilities that are automatically or frequently used to exclude people from transplant lists, and you’ve got 10 organs to go between all of them even in the best-case scenario… you’ve still got 80 people left over. So how is choosing between 80 people in a semi-random way different than choosing between 100 people in a semi-random way? If you really valued the lives of those 20 other people, if you really saw them as deserving a chance, you wouldn’t throw them out on their ass and tell them to go die. You’d treat them just like the other 80 people. You’d handle the problems of scarcity in a way that was fair to everyone involved, the way you try to be with the people who do make the transplant list.
And seriously? Please don’t try to “educate” me about transplants. If it’s not organs, it’s something else people need to survive, and it’s always roughly the same groups of people singled out for not even getting the chance to survive, regardless of what the resource is. And disabled people are always included within the first group of people targeted in times of scarcity. Always. (Yeah, there’s lots of others, but I can’t write about it all at once, my brain won’t do words that way. So anything I say here applies to anyone this kind of deadly high-level BS is applied to.)
Like… pretty much any time I’ve brought up ableism, I get told “There’s not enough _______ to go around,” even in contexts where it makes no sense at all unless your reasoning is very, very ableist. Like disabled people have brought up questions about disability-selective abortion, only to be told that “There’s too many people in the world already” (something also used to justify things like food not being a human right on the basis of race and class). Reflexively, before people even bother to listen to why we have concerns about this. (We’re also assumed to be pro-life or questioning the universal right to abortion in such contexts, whereas feminists bringing up questions about sex-selective abortion are not generally treated like that.) Or why we should live outside institutions. Or why people in the UK who need respirators aren’t stealing resources from poor people in developing countries. This zero-sum bullshit only works at all if you accept that disability is a valid reason for people’s lives to not be worth as much.
So next time someone tells you that your membership in a group means you automatically don’t get some kind of resource that is (really or in their mind) scarce, ask why you automatically get counted out, while other people don’t even if there’s still not enough to go around? And be sure to check and see whether the thing is actually scarce or just built up in people’s minds as scarce to justify denying it to people. If we’re equal to you in value, then you can’t use our disability as a reason to choose these things any more than you can use some totally “innocuous” difference that would never be used and be considered the same as total randomness. People can’t just assume that disability is a quality that justifies instant disqualification from those with even a chance at survival. And even people who think they’ve thought it through all the way…. often haven’t.
So…yeah. I’m really sick of this entire thing, and I’m sick of it being a way to shut us up because we don’t have an answer that we can articulate clearly. (Don’t get me started on having to be able to articulate something clearly in order to believe it, either. Especially because I have no chance of articulating that beyond these two inadequate sentences.)
I’m busy right now, but want to come back to this later. Some very important points
Reminded of this by more related commentary from Mel going around again, specifically talking about some of the dangerous politics around healthcare access and scarcity.
I couldn’t get back around to comment more on this post before now, mostly because it is such a huge overwhelming (and emotionally wrought) topic. I have a lot more to say about it than I can manage even semi-coherently here and now.
Which sounds like a threat–and NOT primarily to the current government, however they might try to slant it .
Royal College of Nursing chief executive Janet Davies said the Government has failed to respond to clear and alarming signals that the tragedy she called “inevitable” is about to happen again.
OK, I had pretty much been waiting for this to get brought up explicitly, especially since some of the totally forseeable consequences of the combo of galloping austerity and the Brexit debacle started getting harder to sweep under the rug.
This is hardly unforseen, but even more worrying given the state the system is already in after years of austerity: British Red Cross CEO defends NHS ‘humanitarian crisis’ remarks (“Mike Adamson says phrase was justified by scale of ‘threat’ posed to nation’s health and wellbeing by pressures on system”)
No way running a sizeable chunk of the existing staff away could go wrong, not at all 🤔 Beyond the very obvious surface level the BMA is willing to address, which is already serious enough.
(Quoting to avoid repeating the same points now. Some of the other commentary on that post is well worth clicking through to read, as well.)
That public scandals post (from 2013) is where Mid-Staffs comes in. Some truly chilling stuff through the link, BTW.
What keeps getting the blame for the deaths and abuses here? Serious understaffing. No doubt that does create problems, but just the fact of overworked staff does not adequately explain why certain groups of people keep getting neglected, abused, and allowed to die…
Just being overworked is not an adequate explanation, much less excuse, for placing such a low priority on providing very basic, often lifesaving care, to certain groups of people. Also placing low priority on staffing for, say, geriatric wards where they know they are going to need to provide more care than they would with younger, more able-bodied people (like, erm, making sure people can eat and drink) is part and parcel of the same problem. Deciding that certain kinds of people don’t deserve what limited resources are available is a very different matter. I am afraid that this is considered normal and inevitable enough not to even warrant much comment, which is disturbing in its own way.
Understaffing does not, in itself, create depraved indifference, and “callous disregard for human life” is exactly the underlying problem here. Deciding that certain people do not deserve basic respect and dignity is the problem.
Understaffing also doesn’t explain why other staff (and patients/family members) who did try to speak out about some of the outright abuse and neglect leading to a bunch of deaths and untold misery “were deterred from doing so through fear and bullying.”
But, it’s easier to blame some terrible institutional problems on scarcity than to do anything substantive about those problems.
What really continues to disturb me is how few nondisabled people were/are willing to even admit that maybe something is seriously fucked up when the same groups of people “inevitably” get the short end of the stick there. And of course what resources are available need to go to people who are worth more.
And of course that doesn’t just apply to that spectacular a level of discrimination and abuse. It’s a serious problem all the way down, and only exacerbated by the Tories trying to dismantle public services. (Or, of course, the ongoing political mess in the US. Which I don’t even have the energy to say much more about.)
Depraved indifference.
So yeah, that sounded a lot like a threat. Using “The Vulnerable” as rhetorical pawns and hostages yet again.
Speaking as a disabled immigrant who has already run into significant problems with getting treated as an annoyance rather than an actual person, and receiving some seriously substandard care over the years. To the point of having to just do without for now, with no obvious ways of getting some necessary practical support. “Just” on a mundane daily level, and no doubt a lot of others further down some bullshit hierarchies of Deservingness are in worse positions.
The situation on the ground is already bad enough for too many people and deteriorating, with all the ongoing scapegoating and scarcity talk. (All the way down, yeah. I don’t even want to know what that guy also has to say about the spectre of “NHS tourism” and foreigners in general, but he’s hardly alone in any of it.)
We really don’t need more threats. While very few people want to see that for a threat at all. Largely thanks to some of the stuff Mel talks about here, alongside just not wanting to look at some systemic problems.
It’s overwhelming, and so is thinking about how many situations in so many places where similar applies.
That ASAN’S Anti-Filicide Toolkit post I reblogged does a pretty good job of articulating one of the main points I’ve been trying to get at in this slightly different context. A lot of the same factors are too relevant here, but especially:
• Isn’t this caused by lack of services?
It’s absolutely true that people with disabilities and our families don’t get enough services. But that’s not what causes these murders.
There are thousands of families across the country with insufficient or nonexistent services who refrain from murdering their disabled family members. In addition, most high-profile cases have occurred in upper-middle-class communities and have been committed by parents who either refused services, or had more family services than is typical. This is not about services. Suggesting that murders could be prevented with more funding holds people with disabilities hostage: give us what we want, or the kid gets it!
When disgruntled employees take guns into their workplaces and murder their colleagues, we don’t use that as a launching point for a conversation about how Americans need better employee benefits or more paid leave. When students shoot people in their schools, we don’t use this as a launching point for a conversation about anti-bullying policies. This doesn’t mean that we don’t care about worker’s rights or student safety; it means that these are separate conversations, and combining them makes excuses for murderers. We feel that drawing a line between filicide and lack of services is equally inappropriate
That kind of excuse flies too well where disabled/elderly people are involved, pretty much across the board. It’s very disturbing to see how well it works applied to outright abuse and letting people die across whole systems, to justify horribleness on an institutional level.
Abusing and killing people (and then trying to cover it up) takes more effort than…not doing that. And “It would be a shame if something happened to Granny, now wouldn’t it?” is just about the worst appeal for funding possible.
But, almost nobody seems to see a problem with any of this. That’s the truly disturbing part.
Gay men who defied medical advice seem to have changed the course of the HIV epidemic in the UK – for the better.
Four London sexual health clinics saw dramatic falls in new HIV infections among gay men of around 40 per cent last year, compared with 2015, new figures show.
This decline may be mostly due to thousands of people buying medicines called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), which cut the chance of catching the virus, online.
“We need to be very cautious at this stage, but I can’t see what else it can be,” says Will Nutland at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who has set up PrEPster, a website that gives people information on how to give themselves PrEP. “Something extraordinary has happened in the last 12 months because of a bunch of DIY activists working off our kitchen tables.”
The medicine has been approved in the UK as a drug for preventing HIV infection in both men and women, but it isn’t yet available on the National Health Service.
“People say, ‘Why don’t gay men just use condoms?’,” says Mags Portman of the Mortimer Market Centre in London, one of the clinics that has seen large declines in diagnoses. “They do, but not all the time. Straight people don’t use condoms all the time either.”
To avoid paying £400 a month for private prescriptions of the brand-name drug Truvada, growing numbers are buying generic versions from online pharmacies in India and Swaziland for £40 a month, through a UK website called I Want PrEP Now.
International drugs
Until recently, most doctors would have advised against buying any medicines online, warning that the process could be illegal or the drugs may not be safe. While it is legal to buy up to a three-month personal supply, it can seem shady as the medicines are sent through several countries to get around custom laws.
But attitudes are changing. Some sexual health doctors now help people who source PrEP online by providing blood tests to check the pills are real and urine tests to ensure people aren’t getting kidney damage as a side effect. So far no pills have turned out to be fake.
These doctors were also reassured when the regulatory body, the General Medical Council, told them its ethical guidelines say clinicians should give patients information about treatments they cannot offer themselves, says Portman.
I like how this article’s tone is amazement/amusement that “internet drugs” are helping instead of disgust that men are having to get drugs shipped from thousands of miles away when they live right next to pharmacies because capitalism creates public health crises for profit.
⬆️⬆️
This isn’t just a problem with these drugs. I have seen multiple people I know in the UK ordering drugs online out of desperation. Like one that comes to mind is apparently the anti-nausea drug I easily get filled in the US is something a friend of mine has to order online in the UK. This is a thing that blocks treatment in general.
In recent years many employment sectors in the UK have come to heavily rely on recruitment from Europe, begging the question why it has taken the government so long to commission the recently announced review into the impact of EU migration on the UK’s society and economy; a review that will only be published six months before the UK must leave the EU.
EU nationals play an invaluable role in health and social care in the UK, and have been vital in addressing the staff shortages seen across the NHS. There are around 135,000 EU nationals working in the NHS and adult social care system in England alone, staffing our A&Es, our GP surgeries, looking after elderly patients in care homes and conducting vital medical research.
Recruiting from the EU has been vital in dealing with staff shortages in health and social care, and the NHS is dependent on EU workers to provide a high-quality, reliable and safe service to patients. Put simply, our health service would not be able to cope without them.
New figures have revealed the already crippling staff shortages the health service is facing, with more than 86,000 vacant posts across the NHS between January and March 2017, which many have suggested is an underestimation.
Poor workforce planning from successive governments has left the NHS in desperate need of more doctors, while the failure to meet the growing patient demand with sufficient funding and resources, has contributed to the overwhelming recruitment and retention crisis in our health service. In a recent BMA survey, seven in 10 hospital doctors reported rota gaps in their departments while almost half of GPs have reported GP vacancies where they work.
The unsustainable pressures facing the NHS mean we are already seeing fewer doctors in training are choosing to apply to or remain in the NHS, while at the other end of the scale, the unsustainable workloads have led many experienced doctors to retire early, or work abroad.
The health service is more reliant than ever on overseas recruitment, with the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, making it clear that we will need to recruit around 2,000 more GPs from abroad to meet staffing targets.
Sadly there is a real risk that Brexit will only worsen the current staffing crisis across the health service. More than four in ten doctors told the BMA that they were considering leaving the UK in light of the referendum result, and we know that non-UK workers have already begun to leave the NHS since we voted to leave the EU.
The most recent set of migration figures, which cover six months since the referendum, also suggest that fewer people from the EU are choosing to come to Britain, as net migration from the EU fell by 51,000.
But this isn’t just about numbers, these highly skilled professionals have enhanced the diversity and skill mix in the UK health system. A diverse profession with a wide range of experience and expertise is beneficial to patient care.
To protect the future of the NHS, the government must work with health organisations to ensure robust transitional arrangements are in place, and that the immigration system remains flexible enough to recruit doctors and other NHS staff from overseas, especially where the resident workforce is unable to produce enough suitable applicants to fill vacant roles.
Dr Andrew Dearden is a GP and treasurer of the British Medical Association (BMA)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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