Doctors vs vets

little_critter

little_critter

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I'm getting very frustrated at all the running around my OH is having to do to find out what's wrong with his finger and so wish I could just send him to my vet!

Vet: I can usually get an appointment with *my* vet in a few days.
Doctor: you're lucky to be able to see *any* doctor within a fortnight.

Vet: get blood test result in a few days and call you to give you the results / discuss next stage.
Doctor: blood tests take 7-10 days. When after 2 weeks you've heard nothing you call to chase. At which point you are told you should have made an appointment for a phone consultation to get the result (no one said this when the blood was taken). The next phone appointment is in 2 weeks.

Vet: x Ray results known there and then or in a few days.
Doctor: results take 7-10 days and they will call you ( we checked this time!). When no call after 2.5 weeks you are told they will chase up the referral (to who? For what? Still no explanation of results). Then further chasing and you are told that was a mistake about the referral, the x Ray showed nothing. Make another appointment ( my question was what do they plan to do in that appointment but my OH didn't ask).

Getting so frustrated, just wish I could take him to my vet! I'm so used to being told what the results mean, what the plan is, what the options are, what they will do next. It seems the doctors like to keep you in the dark.
 
Difference is we pay vast amounts of money to vets.....so getting a diagnose done quickly works to their advantage and ours if we are concerned about our animals.
Guess if we all went private with our GP's it would be the same!
Hope his finger gets sorted soon....and you get less frustrated!

PS-If there was any thing more serious,then he would be seen sooner :)
 
But the point is I still pay for my GP through my taxes so it's not free as such, just free at the point of delivery.
We use the NHS so little (we are rarely ill and use a private dentist as all the NHS ones have closed) I reckon they've got a good deal from this household.
 
Getting told nothing doesn't always mean it's nothing serious. Twice now I've been sent away from NHS services when I shouldn't have been.

Hope you get it sorted soon OP
 
I was just having this conversation with a friend last Thursday! He has one or two issues, some heart and tummy problems and seems to be getting nowhere fast. On Thursday he had an appointment with his Dr but didnt know what time, apparently they would call him during the day and tell him, which meant he had to spend the whole day close enough to the surgery to rock up quickly. He seems to have constantly been chasing appointments and results for the last 6 months. I called my vet on Wednesday morning for an appointment on Thursday, specified a time slot and they called me back later that afternoon with a time within that slot. The vet arrived on Thursday within 10 minutes of the given time. As you say, fantastic service. Now I agree with you both, we do pay the vets for this service, but we do pay for our health care through our taxes. Around here you struggle to get a regular appointment within a month, yes a month. Im not sure what happens in a real emergency tbh but if you call at 8am they do release a few extra appointments each day, you have to be as fast as Usain Bolt to grab one though :)
 
The radio ad always makes me laugh - "if you see blood in your pee - tell your doctor" Yeah - whatever, you would be long dead from bladder cancer before you could even get an appointment!! I spent years without a GP as none would take new patients, now I "think" I have one but NO appointments ever - end of - well stuff it, I don't care anymore, really don't give a toss will treat myself or just not bother.

Vets you ahve to pay - but what a difference! maybe we should pay for GP appointment and weed out timewasters.
 
Absolutely take your point - but your taxes pay for much more than just medical services. If you want a private service get private healthcare and pay to see a private GP.

If you have an accident or fall ill suddenly an ambulance will collect you just the same. If your house catches fire the fire brigade will come out. Your roads will be repaired (well sometimes...) the law courts will still function and the politicians will still be paid.

I fell from my horse and broke my back. The NHS ambulance rescued me. The NHS hospital started to treat me - but the private hospitals took over within a day and finished the job. Still do over 10 years on.

Personally I regard the cost of a private GP appointment a reasonable investment to see who I want when it suits me. If something needs treatment I have private medical insurance. If it needs a prescription I can go back to my NHS GP - but at the moment the actual cost of the drugs paid for privately has always been less than the NHS prescription charge anyway. Even with the high level pain killers I need sometimes. And the private support corset is miles better than the equivalent NHS one.

But I do still have an NHS dentist....
 
Just need to weed out ttime wasters by charging for appointments. You don't need to see a gp about a cold or flu there is nothing they can do anyway you just have to wait it out. It would get rid of all of the old people who go just to complain or have someone to talk to. Harsh but they are just taking up spaces for people with proper problems.
 
I don't think it is a like for like comparison.

After a few nightmares with the NHS I pay for a Private scheme. They keep costs low as usually you still run the gauntlet of the NHS, but if you need quicker service you then jump onto the private doctors. The private scheme does not have to pay out for emergency provision, or keep services for people who do not pay in, so the costs are surprisingly reasonable.

So, I use NHS for most things, and Private for others.

Private doctors and hospitals are just as good as vets! Having had a NHS MRI, waiting for the results etc, then to go privately, I was barely changed and in his office before he was reading and recommending! The appointment was more or less next day, so any treatment could be prompt too :-)

Another thing, the private office has coffee, carpets, is nicely fragrant, is quiet. That may seem frivolous, but when you feel scared and vulnerable it is a comfort that is work more then £££££s.
 
Was thinking exactly that this week, close family friend has had anemia for nearly a year, doctors brushed it off at first, then decided to "monitor" it. Other levels in her blood started behaving oddly, then she got a dull ache in her back. Finally two weeks ago they sent her for full body scans and discovered she has advanced cancer that is probably beyond help now. Should have been caught much much earlier.

That would never happen with a vet. My mare had high liver enzymes and vets scanned straight away. They didn't find anything on the scans so said they would biopsy if levels didn't go back to normal within a few weeks and she was closely monitored.

But you get what you pay for I guess!
 
My partner donated stem cells to his brother after he got cancer, it's what they do now instead of bone marrow transplants, much nicer. The down side is you have to inject yourself once a day for a few days to boost stem cell production. I was down as the injector so to speak. I did the first one and he was such a woozie and made so much fuss about it and made me do it how he had seen the doctor do it, so I ended up hurting him. He rang the doctors to see if a nurse could do it, bearing mind that the stem cell collection was booked in on a certain date, along with the transplant. A procedure that would mean the cancer would not come back. The surgery were unable to help for two weeks, it hadn't been book in so no matter what it was impossible. My partner was very upset and was not keen on me doing it( if he had held still it wouldn't have hurt! ) in desperation he stopped off at our vets and spoke to the receponist, who called in the vet, who happily administered the injection, on the spot, no charge, pop back tomorrow for the last one. I think this just about sums up the NHS,
 
I completely understand your point but I think it is due to the vast amount of timewasters that use the hospital for things they really shouldn't. When me and my brother were in A&E a year ago from him having a cricket ball hit into his mouth (blood everywhere) there was someone sitting next to him who was there because they had been stung by stinging nettles on one patch on their arm. I can't believe they could be bothered with the 3 hour wait! I think charging, even a couple of pounds, would be hugely beneficial in cutting down the queues.
However, on the flipside, my dad is a cardiologist and is one of the hardest working people I know and really tries his hardest to make sure people know what is going on with their treatment and what the next step will be as he understands hospitals can be really daunting.
At the moment we are having a major problem with vets so not really on their side either haha. Living on an island we are limited to who we can have, in the past year 1 vets has shut due to non-payers and the mainland vet has stopped its island cover. Leaving us with 1 established vet practise and 1 person who has only just set up, for an island with at the very least 1,000 horses this is not great and is proving impossible to find an appointment :(
 
Agreed with libbyl on time wasters in a&e too. Seen far too many of them during my many visits for broken bones. I saw one guy in for a small rash on his hands. A chemist would have been more beneficial. Remove the time wasters who demand x rays or ct scans over nothing and want antibiotics to treat a cold you will find lots of spaces become free.
 
Well prepare for the NHS to get much worse, the Govt's new contract which is being pushed through despite huge opposition from junior doctors (all doctors apart from consultants!) will result in more of them leaving the UK to work abroad, where they are better paid, have better working conditions and have more respect. Or more doctors will work as locums at vast expense to the NHS so they can choose to work decent hours for a decent level of pay. Doctors train for 5 years to become qualified then continue training for between 6-8 years in their own time and generally at their own expense to qualify as consultants. The problem doesn't lie with doctors it comes from a lack of resources to pay for the level of care people expect and want. As so many have said, vets are in private practice and to compare them with the NHS is frankly rather unfair.
 
I get a bit sick of people knocking the NHS so be honest if the doctors and nurses were paid enough to not have a huge shortage and their contracts were more reasonable then we would have the great system it should be. Yes you get time wasters but mostly because GPs are over worked due to shortages. So yes by all means pay for treatment which of course means those that cannot pay get an even more **** service
 
I agree with you, windandrain, I think the NHS frontline works incredibly hard and is completely swamped by TOO many people in this country when the infrastructure is not there to support it. Let's take doctors....why is it so hard for our youngsters to do medicine when there is apparently such a shortage? Is it because it costs so much to train a doctor? Then they get offered peanuts as junior doctors and unacceptable working hours so they leave to work abroad? Rant over....
 
I guess there are a lot more people needing or thinking they need treatment than there are horses. I've felt like a proper time waster over the last 5 months, with around 4 GP/nurse appointments, each time I got brushed off, I guess as my symptoms are quite vague and not an obvious 'ouch'. It's easy to feel dejected when they don't take you seriously but they must see so many hypochondriacs and time wasters that I can see why they have a problem. So I did as I would do for my horse and got a second opinion, went to a chiropractor who referred me for a private MRI. The MRI has shown something I can now take back to my GP. I don't resent doing it, I wasn't an urgent case but it has provided a lot of information abut why I feel the way I do.
 
Private versus NHS that is the difference all vets offering a private service often underpinned by insurance and the number of vets per number of horses is quite high in comparison to number of doctors per people. A GP will be seeing a lot more patients per day than a vet and have a lot more on their books too.

Private practice would not exist and could not offer the same level of service at the price they do without the NHS as the doctors are trained by the NHS and for the big operations the hospitals they use are normally NHS ones. There is very little research done in private practice either. Private practice can cherry pick what it treats often only taking on conditions that are profitable to treat.
 
The GP surgery gets around £136 per year for each patient. £136 doesn't go far when paying for the GP's time, the cost of running the surgery, receptionists, health care assistants, nurses and any tests that might be required. That is £136 per year not per consultation. We wouldn't expect a vet to run a business on that level of funding so perhaps that explains why their fees are high but they can offer a more customer focused service.
 
rachk89 said:
It would get rid of all of the old people who go just to complain or have someone to talk to. Harsh but they are just taking up spaces for people with proper problems.
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I think that is an incredibly presumptuous thing to say, as someone who previously cared for the elderly for a long time, they really are usually the ones that don't go unless they really have to, and something is seriously wrong, and even then they apologise profusely for using up the doctors' time.

I agree with charging a small amount for appointments though, although the lack of appointments are the reason all of our A&E departments are overflowing, so would this make it even worse?
 
AShetlandBitMeOnce said:
I think that is an incredibly presumptuous thing to say, as someone who previously cared for the elderly for a long time, they really are usually the ones that don't go unless they really have to, and something is seriously wrong, and even then they apologise profusely for using up the doctors' time.

I agree with charging a small amount for appointments though, although the lack of appointments are the reason all of our A&E departments are overflowing, so would this make it even worse?
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Not the case up here. They have little else to do because of the council removing funding from everything else. I know people who still work with elderly people all over Scotland and to get some bit of attention they want to see a doctor for something as little as a cold. Seen it a lot whenever I get summoned to the gp which thankfully doesn't happen a lot.

They need to tackle both really. Charge people for wasting time in a&e. If they come in for something that is obviously not an emergency then they get charged for it. The doctors are over worked as it is they don't need hypochondriacs panicking everytime they have a headache.
 
I knew I shouldn't have opened this post I don't even know where to start. I wrote a long response then deleted it. There's no point.
 
Sukistokes2 said:
My partner donated stem cells to his brother after he got cancer, it's what they do now instead of bone marrow transplants, much nicer. The down side is you have to inject yourself once a day for a few days to boost stem cell production. I was down as the injector so to speak. I did the first one and he was such a woozie and made so much fuss about it and made me do it how he had seen the doctor do it, so I ended up hurting him. He rang the doctors to see if a nurse could do it, bearing mind that the stem cell collection was booked in on a certain date, along with the transplant. A procedure that would mean the cancer would not come back. The surgery were unable to help for two weeks, it hadn't been book in so no matter what it was impossible. My partner was very upset and was not keen on me doing it( if he had held still it wouldn't have hurt! ) in desperation he stopped off at our vets and spoke to the receponist, who called in the vet, who happily administered the injection, on the spot, no charge, pop back tomorrow for the last one. I think this just about sums up the NHS,
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Haha! What a good vet!
 
Sorry for opening a can of worms, I'm just surprised and frustrated at all the running around, chasing up and wrong info that's happened.
I don't have very many GP appointments (probably several years since the last one) but I've had a LOT of vet appointments recently (self funded as excluded from insurance) so I guess I've just got used to the way vets work rather than the way GPs work.
I do appreciate the NHS and the work the doctors do, it just seems a convoluted way to do things.
 
My doc openly said I will book you an appointment from here as I can get them before they go out, because all the old people know when they are released and like to book once a month just in case :p.

My current GP is amazing, I love being in a small village branch dispensing practice, I do wish they would do medication reviews over the phone though.
 
I'm another in a rural practice, so was our last one and I can't fault either-both for myself and my OH. We've also both had good experiences as outpatients and testing recently at local hospitals. My brother (in another part of the UK) is also having treatment for a chronic condition weekly and can't fault the NHS either.

I would hate for us to go down the route of the US for healthcare (although we are)-just read some threads on US forums about people ruined by medical bills and unable to get treatment for something, being tied to jobs that are awful due to healthcare benefits etc etc.
 
I have to have regular brain mri scans. Last year it took 8 months to get the results. I was also 5hrs after my appointment time for the actual scan. Running slightly behind schedule apparantly. I don't call 5hrs slightly anything.
When I phoned the consultants secretary to chase up the results in case the results had got lost in the post I got a very snotty woman telling me "the consultant was very busy and he does have other patients you know". GP's secretary got a similar reply when she tried. It was only when my GP intervened I actually got the results.
This years results I got within a couple of weeks which is pretty normal timescale and I went in for my mri scan almost exactly on time.
 
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