Family doctors are launching a campaign to explode the “myth” that hospital teams in television dramas such as Casualty and Holby City are the only medics with exciting and important jobs.
GP leaders hope the initiative will dispel the idea that their members do mundane jobs that involve treating nothing more serious than colds and coughs.
The Royal College of General Practitioners wants to persuade young doctors, and even teenagers gearing up for GCSEs, that family doctors are a linchpin in the community and help patients with a range of medical problems.
The initiative comes as new royal college research shows that the UK is facing the potential closure of 594 practices by 2020 because of early retirement and recruitment difficulties. On current trends, by 2020 Britain will be 9,940 GPs short of the number needed to cope with an ageing and growing population, it believes. The campaign, Think GP, seeks to tackle the negative portrayals of GPs on screen and show hospital doctors are not the only ones with challenging roles that affect people’s lives. It wants to banish “the falsehood that circulates in certain parts of the medical world that the role of a GP is somehow run-of-the-mill”.
The college says hospital dramas such as Casualty are “adrenaline-fuelled, with highly skilled medical professionals carrying out exciting procedures and saving lives”. However, Professor Maureen Baker, the royal college chairwoman, said: “When GPs are portrayed on TV, they are unhinged, such as [in] Doctor Foster, grumpy failures like Doc Martin, or inept, as we often see in Doctors.”
The best-known GP in British popular culture is still Dr Finlay, but that drama was 50 years ago
Baker said the best-known GP in British popular culture is still Dr Finlay – the homely GP in the fictional Scottish town of Tannochbrae featured in Dr Finlay’s Casebook – “yet the programme is more than 50 years old”.
She added: “We’re grateful to our colleagues who take part in programmes such as GPs Behind Closed Doors that attempt to showcase the diversity of our profession, but with the scale of the challenge ahead, more needs to be done.”
Starting this week, Think GP is to use videos and social media to promote what the college extols as the “varied and fulfilling” life of a family doctor.
“Our new Think GP campaign explodes the myth that general practice is the poor relation of hospital specialities. In general practice no two days are the same.
“Every day in our surgeries, we manage the care of patients with multiple and complex conditions that even a decade ago would have been automatically referred to hospital,” Baker said.
It aims to persuade freshly qualified young doctors, medical students and even A-level and GCSE pupils to see general practice as a serious career option.
The college warns that early retirement in the face of increasing workloads has contributed to understaffing while some parts of Britain, such as the north-east and east Midlands, face real problems in recruiting young GPs.
The boss of the NHS in England is backing the college’s campaign. NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens recently pledged to increase spending on general practice from £9.6bn to £12bn a year by 2020-21, and to cut the red tape that GPs face and reduce the work that hospitals pass on to them.
“There’s arguably no more important job in modern Britain than that of family doctor,” he said. “There’s not a family in the country that won’t at some point rely on the skill, care and dedication of their GP, and there’s no other branch of medicine that offers greater variety, stimulation and opportunity.”
A brochure to be distributed by the college as part of the campaign describes a GP as “an expert medical generalist – someone able to understand the multiple conditions patients have, as well as their wider health and wellbeing”.
The college says that big changes in how NHS care is delivered in future will mean that “a career as a GP will become more and more intellectually and medically challenging, diverse and fulfilling. GPs will have portfolio careers heading multidisciplinary teams, leading work in areas from geriatrics to neurology, running ‘in-reach’ to hospitals and ‘outreach’ to patients’ homes.”
The campaign is to highlight five GPs who do much more than simply hold surgeries in order to show the variety and responsibility the job involves. One of them, Dr David Hogg, whose practice is on the Scottish island of Arran, also works in the local hospital and is part of the mountain rescue team. Another, Dr Louise Rusk, successfully juggles a career as a GP with working for a hospital-based headache clinic in Northern Ireland and raising two daughters.
NHS England called the Think GP initiative “an important step” towards strengthening the GP workforce in the face of rising patient demand.
A spokeswoman added: “Anyone choosing to become a GP can look forward to a varied and hugely rewarding career, looking after patients and their families, rather than being consulted on particular diseases.”
Doc Martin? Being a GP ‘is much more fun than that’
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder