The experience of one of our readers has caused us to have a complete rethink on the role of GPs in more serious matters. In fact we’re still reeling from hearing about it!
GPs are, of course, portrayed as the gateway to our system, the primary health care providers – whatever our problems, if we see a GP and they think we need specialist help, they will know exactly the right specialist to refer us to.
But if this is so, how is our reader’s experience to be explained – a GP who he’d been using for 5 or 6 years and who he’d thought was quite good, referred him to a specialist who couldn’t possibly have been worse, who not only did him no good but did him considerable harm.
Of course the GP won’t respond to emails asking how this had come about – and our guess is that there wouldn’t be 1 NSW GP in a 100, who, in these, circumstances would. They see themselves as being above being accountable in any way. (And, of course, if they are never going to be held accountable, what incentive is there to get it right – to NOT send patients to their mates, to even NOT send patients to specialists offering kickbacks? And, remember, for every bad specialist there are GPs sending them patients – otherwise they wouldn’t be in business.)
And of course the conventional view of GPs is reinforced in two ways. Firstly, you can’t claim anything back from Medicare for fees paid to a specialist unless you have a referral from a GP. Secondly, as we’ve found recently, when you email specialists, they, and particularly their receptionists and PAs are always saying such nice things about GPs – perhaps, we’re beginning to think, because they largely depend on GPs sending them patients.
And one particularly disturbing aspect of our reader’s experience is this. He had an operation and then follow up consultations with the specialist 4 weeks and 14 weeks afterwards, and when he went back to the GP and got copies of the specialists progress reports, (fortunately the GP gave him these, which we’re sure many GPs wouldn’t have done,) he found that, not only were they full of lies, they were full of things that were almost directly opposite to what he told the reader in person.
So how do we protect ourselves against the sort of thing our reader experienced? Unfortunately, it seems there is no alternative but for us to do our own research on specialists – the one our GP has referred us to, if we’ve seen a GP, or other specialists we think my be helpful. Our reader says he is so angry with himself that he didn’t do this, as he believes that, even quite preliminary research would have indicated that there were lots of better specialists to see than the one he was referred to.