One of the purposes of the NHS was to improve the service provided by General Practitioners - making sure that everyone was included. The 1943 document in which the Labour Party proposed a National Service for Health went so far as to propose that people should readily have visits by consultants, let along General Practitioners. But the actual outcome of the NHS has been that we have among the lowest number of doctors per capita in the advanced world. One of the consequences of this is that visits to the home by doctors have dramatically declined. The percentage of GP consultations in the home has slumped from 22 per cent in 1970 to four per cent today. For the details in Social Trends, click here.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS
Comments (1)
TrackBack (6)
Comments
Warning: file(http://63.247.138.2/~bartholo/randomquotes.dump) [function.file]: failed to open stream: No route to host in /home/bartholo/public_html/archives/2005/03/the_decline_of.php on line 277
Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in /home/bartholo/public_html/archives/2005/03/the_decline_of.php on line 277
I apologise for promoting one of my own postings yet again but I posted on this very subject on the 22nd of March here:
http://www.thersites.org.uk/blog/?p=8
The posting is somewhat provocative but are what a substantial proportion of GPs think - we just dare not say it. Home visits are a poor use of GPs time & are not indicators of good care - health services who do not have established home visiting by GPs still have far better health outcomes.
Posted by: Thersites at March 24, 2005 08:14 PM