Oh, I see. So it’s my fault. There I was, thinking that the general swamping and near collapse of accident and emergency services in hospitals across Britain might be the result of, you know, some sort of systemic problem within the NHS. With me, a mere member of the public, just being an occasional victim. But no! Apparently it’s all because I took my wailing two-year-old daughter in, one Sunday afternoon last year, to get some antibiotics for her ear.
This is good to know. For, had I not been told that all this was the fault of chumps such as me heading to such places for the sorts of trivial ailments better treated by a traditional family doctor, I might in my ignorance have been inclined to blame other people. Such as — to pick an example off the top of my head — Britain’s traditional family doctors, many of whom might indeed still agree to see a sick toddler at 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon these days, but probably only if you stalk them, perhaps with dogs, then chase them through deserted woodlands before pinning them to a tree with a crossbow bolt and holding up your child before their dying eyes. I’d imagine.
Or I might have blamed Tony Blair and his many, many health secretaries, who (I feel it was one of the bald ones) somewhere along the way decided to remove the responsibility for out-of-hours care from GPs and hand it to primary care trusts. Who still employed the same GPs for a while, but forced them to do the same work for far, far more money, poor loves, which was obviously a situation they resented terribly. Or Andrew Lansley, who did… well, God alone knows what to the NHS, really, but whatever it was, whoever it left in charge seems in many areas to have abandoned meaningful out-of-hours care altogether.
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