I would like to highlight a particular area where taxpayers money is being wasted, with double payments being made for GP consultations.

Firstly, money is wasted when your GP is paid to have you on their list, for your medical needs.

If you attend a polyclinic, urgent care or walk-in centre instead, the cost doubles up, because that centre’s GP or nurse consultation has to be paid for too.

However, there may be a less expensive ways of delivering services in the community that are urgent but not of a critical nature that require a major A&E service in hospital.

That is, if GPs in an area were prepared to work a rota system, where each surgery releases a GP to take turns in manning one of these centres to spread the load of extended hours.

The second way money is wasted is when your doctor advises you to go to a hospital to see a consultant for your particular ailment, his or her letter does not apparently go straight to the hospital to make an appointment for you, but to another group of chosen clinicians first, who can class you as non-urgent.

This not only undermines your GP’s qualifications to prescribe, but also creates a larger bill for the second diagnosis and referral of the unseen patient.

What we are being presented with, in regard to the Health and Social Care Bill, looks like more and more privatisation of our health care services, supported at every opportunity by Nick de Bois MP, who has unfairly criticised unfairly Enfield Council’s considered opinion, on the gathered evidence for the need to retain all the major services at Chase Farm Hospital.

It is a great shame when before the election he professed so loudly with his ministerial colleagues the need to retain these same services at the hospital.

IVY BEARD
Littlebrook Gardens, Cheshunt