BH4S started out as a disjointed group of Lakeside patients, most of whom didn’t even know each other. We were brought together in our united concerns about the shocking way patients from Stamford and its surrounding villages were being treated by their healthcare providers.
Not all of the problems we experience are down to the Lakeside Group and its lack of a competent strategy to offer a replacement service to its patients, on the closure of St Mary’s (although this is pretty high up the list). Our committee members were already fighting health campaigns long before the Covid pandemic hit and it would have been very easy to step back, in 2020 and let matters take their course. Thank goodness we didn’t. Had we done that, St Mary’s Surgery would now be permanently closed, most likely being turned into a group of Air BnB apartments!
We were mobilised by our sheer sense of outrage that a private group, run from outside our town, could, over a period of five years, oversee the reduction of our GP services to just one surgery. Not only to oversee the closure of a major surgery, but believe they could do so with scant regard for the obligations placed on them by NHS England and the CCG. Under no circumstances should such a closure have taken place without an impact assessment having been carried out and it most definitely should not have taken place without any patient consultation whatsoever beforehand. Over an extremely short period of time, this group did much to damage their reputation with their own patients. Lakeside would not then engage with the patients representative group (the PPG), so long as members of the committee who had opposed the closure of St Mary’s remained. For the good of our town and so that a new PPG could be formed, those committee members stepped down and instead decided to form ‘Better Healthcare for Stamford’, which now campaigns for joined-up thinking on all of our healthcare provision, not just our GPs.
It is a sad indictment that very many of the problems the PPG had warned about have now come to fruition. Stories of outrageously long queues to reach the surgery to make an appointment, where formerly those who had internet access had been able to book an appointment in a couple of minutes, now abound. Of all the questions patients have for Lakeside, this is the one that appears to make least sense. This system left administrators and receptionists free to take calls from those who needed to make an appointment by telephone, or those calling for routine affairs, like test results. Why on earth any organisation, least of all a group of GPs, would want to introduce an artificial barrier like this beggars belief.
Our market stall days these past two weeks have shown us that Stamford is not the only town experiencing similar problems and BH4S would not be surprised to see other campaign groups setting up. Most can see a pattern of online resources and virtual appointments developing and not everybody is against this, especially busy workers, but they just want to urge their GPs to introduce these measures carefully, whilst (most importantly) maintaining services for those who cannot use online services, or just simply want to see a Doctor face-to-face.
Once a patient loses trust in their GP, there is almost no way back. GPs must treat relationships with patients far more importantly than commercial considerations which appear to cut them out of the decision-making process. Anybody can learn from speaking to patients and hearing their personal experiences. It is simply wrong to make decisions as important as this without doing so.
This is why BH4S exists and we will campaign to urge cohesion and patient consideration by all healthcare providers in the four counties and commissioning groups in our geographically unique situation.