Ele Ludeman: Do you want govt between you & your GP?

Labour’s policy to fund three GP visits for everyone has been criticised for many reasons, including that it would overwhelm already overstretched general practices.

Labour’s answer to that is to get between us and our GPs:

. . .Instead of patients booking their appointments through a first come, first serve system, a nationwide triage system would see patients assessed over the phone to determine the level of care they need and when. . .

How will a call centre work for people who don’t want to share intimate health information; people who are anxious or agitated and those who have difficulty explaining their needs?

How will the system stop patients calling a clinic directly for appointments without stopping them from calling to speak to someone in the clinic on other business?

GPs’ receptionists already triage patients who phone for an appointment and they do it in many, possibly most cases, with the knowledge of the patients and their history.

A call centre would be impersonal, put a barrier between GP clinics and patients and it will add costs.

The idea of three taxpayer funded GP visits for everyone is designed to be the sugar that helps the medicine of Labour’s capital Gains tax proposal go down.

The CGT policy is bad medicine and funding three GP visits won’t make it any sweeter.

It would be wasteful to fund visits for those of us who can afford to pay for ourselves.

It would provide little if any benefit for those who need more than three visits but can’t afford them.

And complicating it with a national triage system that comes between us and our GPs makes it worse.

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.