WHERE have all the doctors gone?

No, not a 1960s folk song. The changes in the way local GP surgeries work, changes said to be introduced due to the pandemic, have stripped away the humanity from the health service at this coal-face level of patient and doctor relationship.

It’s now the exception to be able to get an appointment, face to face or more likely, mask to mask.

Instead, queries about health conditions start with an E-consult - a totally impersonal, dispassionate, cold internet-based form to be filled out like an Amazon order form but without the anticipation of something nice turning up in the post a few days later.

Gone are the opportunities to enjoy the facial expressions or the asides about how thing are of a trusted doctor, a friend, as you explain your current predicament.

And now, neither can you email you doctor, not that email is a particularly warm and friendly method of communicating with anyone, but try and you just get a cold automated reply telling you that the surgery cannot accept emails anymore.

This is not deplorable because of Covid 19 or any other version for that matter.

What is deplorable is the way doctors have so readily fallen into line with this new way of working, if working be the right word - every new initiative seems to widen the gap between doctor and patient and we never hear any complaints about it from the doctors!

And what of the future?

We are told we are going to have to learn to live with Covid. But what does ‘living with Covid’ mean? If doctors’ surgeries become any more redundant then doctors can run their businesses from home, just tuning in occasionally to get the latest E-consult that concerns them.

George Orwell wasn’t wrong was he?

Max Fisher

Another invisible patient

Sandford