Tag: burnout

Why I am still fighting for general practice

Why I am still fighting for general practice

Posted by | 8 Dec 2017 | |

General practice can sometimes feel like a battleground… it certainly has a fight on its hands but it is a fight that is worth fighting.     Peter Aird is a GP in Bridgwater, Somerset. GP practices are closing at an alarming rate with more and more GPs abandoning the profession as workload rises exponentially and recruitment continues to struggle to keep up with the number of doctor leaving. Reflecting on the assertion, given some support at the 2017 RCGP conference by the chair Dr Helen Stokes-Lampard, that the causes of ill health are largely social, Dr Phil Hammond...

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General practice in Scotland and Australia: the experience of two GPs

General practice in Scotland and Australia: the experience of two GPs

Posted by | 2 Mar 2017 | , |

Jane Gall and Derek Wooff, are both general practitioners who worked in Stranraer, Scotland for 26 years and have been working in Shepparton Medical Centre for the last 6 years. General practice is a good job. It uses knowledge, experience, judgement and intuition to provide appropriate care and this complex process is both stimulating and rewarding. Currently with rising patient expectations and decreasing investment, solutions to workload issues may benefit from broader thinking and looking to other models of care. We wish to reflect on our experience of translating care from the NHS in Scotland to Medicare in Australia....

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“Too big to talk about”: Organisational momentum and its paralytic wake

“Too big to talk about”: Organisational momentum and its paralytic wake

Posted by | 7 Feb 2017 | |

David Zigmond was a small practice GP in south London 1977-2016. You can read Obituary for St James Church Surgery here. Corporatism often enlarges and entrenches itself by increasing demands for compliance. Eventually though, unchecked, this will sicken any organisation. Such is now evidently ailing our NHS. A brief glimpse from a small conference provides a sample. November 2016, London. A small conference of (mostly junior) doctors. The brief: to better survive the increasing stresses of their work. They are being mentored, guided, enabled and reassured by evidently concerned and sympathetic senior clinicians and cohort managers. Supportive, ventilatory and...

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Time for the old guard to join the social media fray?

Time for the old guard to join the social media fray?

Posted by | 15 Sep 2016 | , |

The news is everywhere. I don’t mean this in the way that I might if I were a dewy-eyed aspiring journalist, seeing fascination and potential scoops in everything around me. I mean that news coverage seems to be literally everywhere; on the TV, on the radio, on the computer, on the phone in my pocket, on a big screen in Waterloo train station. It’s inescapable. And when it comes to health news, or more particularly doctor news, it never seems to be good news. Headlines such as: “1 in 4 cancer cases missed: GPs send away alarming number of...

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