Doctors slashing hours? Their grandkids will suffer for it
FIGURES just out show that one in four patients who actually manage to see a doctor are given less than five minutes of their time.
Some only get one minute, which is just enough time to get into the surgery, and then get out again.
You can’t even take someone’s temperature in a minute, or hit them on the knee with a rubber hammer.
Doctors themselves say that if they are to do their job properly, each patient needs to be given at least ten minutes.
So how do you think they should deal with the problem?
More doctors? A recruitment drive abroad? Tell ill people to man up and grow a spine?
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Yes, well you’re quite wrong, because what they’ve actually decided is that they should work fewer hours.
At the moment, three in every five GPs work just six half days a week.
And now they are saying that in exchange for the £100,000 they currently trouser every year, they should cut their working day by a further two and half hours.
Well, here’s a message to the nation’s medicine men.
Before going ahead with this plan to spend most of the day snoozing in your garden, think of your grandchildren . . .
I was expelled from school just ten weeks before my A levels, which meant my chances of finding a decent job were quite slim.
But despite the odds, and the complete lack of qualifications, I wrote to various local newspapers in Yorkshire asking if I could get a job as a journalist.
Amazingly, the editor of the Rotherham Advertiser asked me to come in for an interview and, in his oak-panelled office, he started to talk about Dr Ward, a local GP who’d also been a columnist on the Doncaster Gazette. “He’s my grandfather,” I said.
The editor leaned forward and said: “Let me tell you something about Dr Ward. He came to my house at two in the morning, in the middle of an air raid, in the Second World War and delivered my first daughter. I’ve always wanted to pay him back, so you start on Monday.”
In the current climate, doctors do not get out of bed at two in the morning to help a baby into the world.
This means no one ever owes them a favour. Which is going to be a problem, many years from now, when their useless, badly behaved grandchildren want to get a job.
EVEN though the wifi in the House of Commons is notoriously weak, it emerged yesterday that it was Tory MP Neil Parish who had been spotted in there watching pornography.
Lady MPs are saying this is demeaning to women, but I’m not sure about that.
He has a background in farming . . . so goodness knows what he might have been watching.
WHEN I look at all the hideous furniture in Putin’s office, I can’t help wondering if maybe he was a footballer at some point in the past.
It looks like he decorated it by spending £1million at Woolworths.
Not a cloo what Amal said . . . but it sounded lovely
I’VE always assumed that Amal Clooney is just another drippy human rights loony who can only ever get her lefty messages across because she’s married to George.
But this week I heard her give a speech to the United Nations, and it was extraordinary because she has the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard.
It was like having warm honey dripped into my ears.
I’ve no idea what she was on about but I could have listened to her all day.
No Mow May
PEOPLE with hairy armpits are urging gardeners to put their lawnmowers in the shed and have a No Mow May.
It’s like Movember, only instead of letting your face go back to nature, it’s your garden.
They say that leaving your grass alone will encourage all sorts of new plants to grow, which is great news for the insects.
Plus, they add, you’ll save yourself both time and – if your mower runs on petrol – lots of money.
It all sounds tremendous, but you have to accept that after a month you’ll end up with a garden full of nothing but thistles, nettles and wasps.
George b-lew him away
AT last weekend’s F1 grand prix at Imola, in Italy, Lewis Hamilton qualified badly and spent most of the race at the back of the field, trying and failing to get past someone who was driving what was basically a Morris Marina.
Afterwards, his boss apologised to Lewis for giving him such a terrible car.
The commentators soon joined in as well, saying that Lewis is still the Goat.
Unfortunately, however, it didn’t escape my attention that Lewis’s team-mate, a young man called George Russell with Lewis, came home in fourth.
Nor did it escape the attention of the post-race pundit, Nico Rosberg, who hates Hamilton.
He told us gleefully that Lewis had been soundly beaten by his younger team-mate, and then, with a huge smile, that they’d been driving the same car.
He was wrong, though.
The Mercedes team forgot to change the set-up of George’s car when they fitted dry tyres, which meant that, actually, his was worse.
Water bit of genius
IT’S been a big news week but the most important thing in my life has been my new dog bowls.
They have what look like three upturned mini yoghurt pots at the bottom, which means my labradors can no longer wolf down their supper in an unhealthy four seconds.
They have to use their tongues and their snouts to get at their food, and it can take them a much more restful ten minutes to finish everything.
I was going to say these so-called slow-eating dog bowls are the best invention since penicillin, but just a few days later I bought a garden sprinkler which has wheels and is propelled round the garden by the water flowing through it.
This means I don’t have to get out of my chair every ten minutes to move it and then get soaked in the process.
Hot and bother
DURING the pandemic, everyone stayed at home doing nothing but watching Joe Wicks and wiping their bottoms on the four tons of lavatory paper they’d bought.
So you’d imagine that the amount of global warming gases we produce would fall dramatically.
And you’d be right. It did. Nasa says that in 2020, carbon dioxide emissions fell by a whopping 5.4 per cent.
You’d therefore assume that global temperatures would fall as well. But they didn’t.
Even though there were no cars on the road and most of the factories were closed, the planet’s thermometer continued to go up.
This is a worry. Because it means that even if we go back to the Stone Age, we still won’t be able to stop the ice caps melting and Great Yarmouth slipping below the waves.
May as well fire up the Range Rover, then.
Gives me hope
NEVER in all human history have we seen anyone look less like an athlete than Tyson Fury.
He appears to have a flobbery back and his legs look like pipe cleaners.
That’s one of the reasons I like him so much.
He gives fat, ungainly looking people like me hope.
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And there’s more.
Unlike other boxing champions, who have pet tigers and chromed lorries, he pootles about in a 2007 Volkswagen Passat and lives in Morecambe.
Which I’m sure is very lovely, but it’s not Las Vegas, is it?