Patients of the Sudbury Primary Care Practice are objecting to their GP practice being taken over a new provider without any consultation. In this guest blog Paul Lorber expresses his anger about their treatment by NHS England:
The patients from Sudbury have had enough of being messed about by the bureaucrats from NHS England.
We therefore occupied the GP Surgery in protest at being ignored.
NHS England are refusing inform us as patients and do not respond to any communications.
We (I have been a patient of this practice for over 30 years) have therefore decided to take direct action to hammer home our message.
More occupations are planned as we are determined to keep our existing doctors and not have the GP Surgery taken over.
These are my letters to NHS England:
Dear Ms Peppard
Please treat this email as a formal complaint against NHS England.
NHS England have created confusion, uncertainty and worry for the over 8,000 patients at this GP Surgery over the past 12 months.
NHS England representatives have provided misinformation and NO information and failed to respond to questions on a timely basis.
It is clear to me as a taxpayer that all the NHS England is good at is to waste public money and that the organisation is nothing more than a self serving waste of time.
Can you please pass this email to the head of NHS England and ask him/her to answer a very simple question by Friday of this week - What have NHS England done with my GPs and why have they failed to inform me?
Yours sincerely
Paul Lorber
Dear Ms Peppard
I note that another 9 days have passed without any information from NHS England.
After all I am only a patient so what do I matter?
Yet the NHS England spokesperson is happy to tell the local Newspaper that a new provider will take over my GP Surgery on 1 November.
In view of this confident statement of certainty I fail to see why NHS England do have the decency to respond to questions from patients or to keep us informed.
I appreciate that you wish that we all just died or disappeared. Unfortunately we have no intention of doing so and every intention of fighting for our rights and our GPs.
Can you please respond by this Friday.
Yours faithfully
Paul Lorber
Patient at Sudbury Vale Farm GP Practice and a Taxpayer contributing to the salaries of NHS England Staff
This same thing has also happened to the Harness Wembley practice in Chaplin Road and despite letters to NHS England (London region) there have been no replies.
ReplyDeleteThe walk-in centre based in the same premises now look in danger of being closed down because of the change of provider and the Brent CCG standard response is an automated response saying it will reply in 20 days' time - so perhaps marginally better than NHSE London then.
What has happened at the Sudbury Court and Harness practices is a sad reflection of what has happened within our NHS. When I started work in the NHS nearly 45 years ago the most important people were the senior experienced doctors who were in the position to fight the regional health authorities for monies etc and their interests were their patients. These days the whole thing is administered by bodies such as NHS England which are remote and "pen pushers" and patients are thought of as commodities and not the people or patients with individual needs. The whole balance has swung in the wrong direction.
ReplyDeleteThe people at NHS England probably are unable to realise the difference between organising and running an NHS service and organising a string of supermarket branches and equate patients with packs of frozen peas or fish fingers.