Doctors critical of advice to COVID patients to “ring their GP.”
Calling your local GP is a good idea for many health problems. But, when a pandemic is in full swing, and thousands of people are getting sick every day, asking patients to call their GP may not be the best approach.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the general view is that people infected with the virus should contact their GPs in the first instance. For example, in NSW, the government website advise people who have tested positive for COVID-19 to “Monitor your symptoms. If you are concerned you should call your GP”.
But, when a state is reporting over 10,000 new COVID-19 cases every day, is contacting your GP a good approach? According to Brisbane GP Dr Wendy Burton, the whole idea is just not manageable.
“The idea that general practice can accommodate all the people who’ve got COVID-19, who aren’t in hospital – which is 14 000 people yesterday, every day, on top of what we already do – that’s insulting, it’s demeaning. It means that people no longer think that general practice is anything except the dustbin,” Dr Burton said in a news release from the Medical Journal of Australia.
A national disaster?
Some doctors argue that the government should declare the COVID-19 pandemic a national disaster, which may help change people’s mind about the urgency of the situation, and would also release additional resources.
But, according to Dr Simon Torvaldsen, chair of the AMA WA Council of General Practice, the underlying long-term problem is poor funding for GPs. “This is a critical issue that the AMA is pushing hard with both federal government and opposition,” Dr Torvaldsen told Medical Forum.
“Advice to “ring your GP” is not a policy, it is simply a politician’s nothing answer to a journalistic question. Patients can certainly ring, make phone appointments etc, but if we don’t have the appointments available due to being flooded with unnecessarily anxious patients, that won’t help anyone,” Dr Torvaldsen said.
“We are not a telephone help line. We certainly cannot handle the volume of dealing with every positive patient and most won’t need a GP,” he added.
According to Dr Torvaldsen, declaring a disaster would probably make things worse. “Declaring a disaster will do nothing to help (we are unlikely to get useful resourcing this way) and probably make the situation worse by fostering more anxiety,” he said.
In WA, the health department is following a different strategy, focusing on developing a home-based option. According to Dr Torvaldsen, the idea is to have a “dedicated home monitoring service with phone support available to everyone who is COVID positive who think they need it (some won’t). This will not require people to “ring their GP” and more serious cases will be escalated,” Dr Torvaldsen said.
The main problem in WA, according to AMA is the very slow response of the health department to Omicron, which is slowly spreading across the state. According to Dr Torvaldsen there is a need for new policies and guidelines on how to handle the pandemic, as well as a firm new date for reopening our borders.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to ensuring we are all vaccinated, and we have the best policies in place to slow and limit the spread of the virus.
“The AMA is strongly involved with both State and Federal governments (regarding) COVID, we don’t always agree precisely but they do listen to our input and the dialogue has generally been strong and constructive. I have also been working locally with the WA branch of the RACGP and we are united on all the major COVID issues affecting GP,” Dr Torvaldsen said.