Patrick Christys: Has the British Medical Association been hijacked by political activists?

I think the British Medical association has forgotten one of the key elements of the Hippocratic oath - to do no harm.

News today suggests that the BMA has been hijacked by a militant of glorified political activists and they’ve decided to go to war with the government.

Why? Because we’re coming out of a pandemic and so their enemy is weak. But I’m any war there are casualties, and those casualties in this case are you, me and our loved ones.

The latest development is that Richard Vautrey, chair of the British Medical Association’s General Practitioner’s Committee, is stepping down - well, in the same way that a disgraced pirate would choose to ‘step’ off the plank before being jabbed in the back by Blackbeard’s sword. Although in this case, Blackbeard is a medically trained Trot who wants to topple the government.

Vautrey helped broker a deal that unlocked billions of pounds for the NHS but a condition of that was that the government wanted them to see more patients face-to-face.

There was even talk of a league table of GP practices naming and shaming those who were refusing to do as many face to face appointments as they should be.

And now they’re threatening strike action.

So, in short, they want more money and less accountability.

But apparently 12 militant members of the BMA said that the deal struck with government was a surrender and they forced their chair out.

So, essentially, 12 people with radical political views are now in charge of the doctor’s trade Union - and they want gps across the country to go on strike.

The number of face to face appointments currently stands at around 60%, which is 20% lower than pre-pandemic levels.

Clinicians were actually surveyed about how good virtual appointments were, and 93% of them said they felt they were worse for patients, and led to vast amounts of misdiagnoses.

So, unequivocally, the current set up is bad for patients health.

There’s a misconception that there’s a campaign against GPS, well, there isn’t, there’s just massive patient dissatisfaction. How many people in your family have received excellent care on the NHS recently, now think about how many people have been badly let down? How long have people been waiting for a Gp appointments, the result of a scan? A biopsy? It shouldn’t be like this, it’s not good enough.

There are cases of people finding it impossible to go and get a face to face appointment with their GP, but when they turn up for their Covid jab, there they are, sat there, with a needle at the ready.

Funny that, isn’t it? Could it be that that is because they’re paid per jab? £12.58 per dose apparently.

One GP gave a very vivid account of exactly how deadly the current situation is. He said: ‘“I feel ashamed calling myself a GP.

“One patient had a melanoma on the back of her neck. She was told over a screen it was nothing to worry about and prescribed steroid cream. Now it has metastasized... A lady in her 80s with lower back pain – prescribed paracetamol over the telephone for six months. When she came to see me, her spine was full of cancer... A woman with a cough whose GP would not see her, said it was just a virus. Like a lot of people self funding, she has a CT scan, finds out she actually has cancer deposits in her ribs and her sternum, probably won’t be here by Christmas. Someone turned round [to her] and said ‘I’m sorry, you’re just a casualty of the Covid era’.”

When you go outside this evening to watch the fireworks, you’ll notice that the temperatures have dropped. It’s heading towards winter and the inevitable, annual NHS backlog that that causes.

Elderly people all over Britain will simply not be able to afford to heat their homes this winter with rising energy bills. So they’ll get sick.

And here we have a cabal of militant medics who are willing to let people die in a bid to either topple the government, or line their own pockets. Or both.

Strike action is usually always about workers rights. Well what about patients rights? The NHS isn’t free, we all pay for it. We clapped for it every week, would you clap for it now?

If the BMA goes to war with the government, they may well win. But they’ll lose the war with the public, the war to win our hearts and minds, and our trust.