GP's advice: flu line teething trouble
Updated on 25 July 2009
The new national swine flu advice line has eased the pressure on GPs but there are still teething problems, writes Dr Peter Stott.
I was talking to Steve Price, Chief Executive of Thamesdoc yesterday. Thames doc is the biggest out-of-hours provider in the UK. They take over from GPs when we go home in the evening and at week-ends.
Out-of-hours, Thamesdoc looks after the primary care needs of the whole population of Surrey, parts of West Sussex and Hampshire.
Steve is a lovely man, always keen to help. He has been with Thamesdoc since 1993 when I can remember being one of the cooperative of GPs who rushed around in cars, excitedly flashing our green lights.
He was telling me of the problems they have had keeping up with calls since the swine flu epidemic started. Like me, he was delighted that the national flu advice line has now come online and is able to take much of the strain.
Steve told me that at the beginning of last week, Thamesdoc was peaking at 1000 calls related to swine flu each night. The national advice line started at lunch-time on Thursday and since then, calls had dropped to about 400 a night.
Even this was placing a lot of extra load on the call-centre staff and on the doctors and nurses who talk to patients. Thamesdoc have put out an urgent request for extra doctors to join the team.
Normally doctors who work for Thamesdoc all have specialist qualification as a GP. Now the GP registrars are also being recruited - qualified doctors training as specialist GPs who normally work under the supervision of senior GPs - just like registrars in hospital.
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Steve said that their extra salary bill for the last few weeks was already at £40,000 and bound to go higher.
Like me, Steve had experienced teething problems with the national system. Mine had been on Wednesday evening when I was manning the practice's flu-line.
A lady had rung in saying she had used the national flu web-site which had decided she would benefit from Tamiflu, which gave her a unique reference number and directed her to a local pharmacy to pick it up. When she got there, the pharmacist said he knew nothing about it.
She had rung the Primary Care Trust and been told to ring her GP to ask for advice. (GPs are invariably the solution of last resort when no-one knows what to do - even when it is a software malfunction).
"What are you going to do about it?" she asked. "If you don't sort it out, I'm going to report you to the hospital" - a common threat which no longer frightens me. She would not hear my argument that I had little power to influence a computer server somewhere far away. She was adamant it was my problem and probably my fault.
Steve explained that Thamesdoc had experienced similar issues and that the fault had been traced to the server's programming for Surrey addresses. Though the names of the pharmacies had been uploaded, their email addresses had not. This fault had been rapidly rectified once it was identified.
So far, so good. The Flu Advice service seems to be taking up the load. Calls in the practice are down to half what they were at the beginning of the week. It is now up to the common-sense of the UK population to ensure that the service will not be abused.
Dr Peter Stott is a GP at the Tadworth Medical Centre in Surrey.
