Friday, February 5, 2010

DOCTORS SHITBAG NURSES Wednesday 3rd February 2010

The Revive nurse practitioner organisation has established a clinic down at Tuggeranong.Guess who's shit-bagging it.

A report in the local rag quotes the ACT Division of General Practice (barking dog of the medical and drug industries) as saying that 'lives would be put at risk by having a nurse treating patients.'

This is just plain dreadful. It's scare-mongering. It's shit-bagging a division of the health industry that the medical industry couldn't survive without. The Executive of the ACTDGP must be mad!

The ACT Division of General Practice, an organisation set up to provide doctors with the professional development training they don't seem to be able to provide themselves (and subsidized by the Commonwealth and ACT Governments to the tune of a couple of million bucks a year) has been vocal in lobbying the ACT Government for more doctors.

They keep bleating that doctors are over worked, and yet as soon as someone sets up a nurse clinic to do the stuff that drover's dogs could do, which nurses do best and doctors don't need to do at all, the Division goes ape.

The ACT Government has even put up the money to employ some one to scrounge around for more doctors for chrissakes. It's also paying an exorbitant amount of rate-payer's funds to subsidize a medical degree at the Australian National University.

It's now time for the ACT Government to withdraw funding from the Division. Doctors are quite capable of funding their own professional development. With a couple of million less in the kitty they'll have less staff to write blistering press releases shit-bagging nurses.

Anyway the only seminars doctors will go these days are the slap up silver service dinners at the Hyatt provided by the drug industry. That's why 80% of the doctors in Canberra are practicing junk medicine - treating symptoms with drugs and not prescribing treatments which restore poor function to good.

The Division of General Practice has been singularly inept in diverting doctors away from the practice of junk medicine. It's time the ACT Government divorced itself from this tawdry, medico-centric organisation.

Anyway here's the guts of the Division's press release shit-bagging the nursing industry.

'GP's cannot support any stand alone, nurse led clinic that attempts to substitute for a more collaborative model of care. Widely recognised is that patients enjoy improved health outcomes when they are treated with coordinated, continuous, comprehensive patient-centric care, delivered by an appropriate team of health professionals.'

I would have thought it quite appropriate for nurses to run 'Mothers and Babies' clinics, dress wounds, stitch up simple cuts, draw blood, dispense repeat prescriptions to hypertensives, diabetics and arthritics and tell people to go home to bed and take and Aspro when they have the flu. They could give out medical certificates for things like the flu and save people the bother of traipsing through the surgery and forking out $80 for the pleasure.

I would have thought it quite appropriate for people to bypass the surgery altogether for most health complaints, collect $200 and go straight to the nursery(!) or the gym when they have a crook back, any of the metabolic dysfunctions and feel shidhouse.

The only collaboration GP's want is the collaboration between the medical industry and the drug industry. They certainly don't want to co-operate with the fitness industry. That's competition! They obviously don't want to co-operate with the nursing industry either. That's competition too!

Reading between the lines of the ACTDGP press release, doctors will only collaborate with the nursing industry as long as they get their $80, and as long as they employ the nurses in a servile role.

Anyway, I say the more nursing clinics the better. Doctors will get home in time for the news.

The medical industry has become a giant, over-protected, bloated slug. It's time the Government worked out the difference between health and medical; time it restricted doctor's access to the provider numbers of some of the treatments that can be more effectively and more cheaply dispensed by other health industry groups.

Then we would only have to put up with doctors bleating about how poor they are, not how over-worked they are.

Plus the Division of General Practice is talking through the seat of its pants when it says: 'that patients enjoy improved health outcomes when they are treated with coordinated, continuous, comprehensive patient-centric care, delivered by an appropriate team of health professionals.'

Substitute the word 'doctor' when you see the phrase 'appropriate team of health professionals'.We know that's bunkum, because while the medical industry has been at the hub of health services the health of the Australian community has got progressively worse.

The nurses union should request that its members withdraw their services to the medical industry until the ACT Division of General Practice publishes a public apology. The nurses union should embark on a concerted campaign to encourage more nurses to set up in private practice and take more customers off the over-worked doctors.

As an aside don’t you just love the alliteration; ‘coordinated, continuous, comprehensive patient-centric care.’ Sounds like something that could only have been written by Hill Knowlton!

On the track
I got up early and flew to Adelaide. All I did was walk up and down Hindley street when I went for tea. So put it down as a very mild day. The Heart Foundation would have given me a pat on the back. Two 10-minute walks; I must be getting fitter.

John Miller
http://www.globalbackcare.com/
http://www.fitandhealthyonline.com/

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