Battle begins to beat the NHS backlog after Covid

Dr Sahira Dar, a GP in Glasgow’s Pollokshields, isn’t expecting the NHS to “bounce back quickly” and instead believes a five to ten-year recovery plan is needed. “Even if we bounce back, what do we go back to?” she says. “A service that was already strained? Sometimes you need a crisis to make real change and maybe this is the crisis that we needed to make that change.” Her GP practice has dealt with a high number of Covid cases in the last year, but managing other chronic conditions including diabetes and heart disease is also part of the daily workload. “The issues at the top are just being filtered down to community level and, being at grassroots level, we are picking up the pieces,” says Dr Dar. “We are now seeing diabetics who haven’t called us for a year, their blood tests are overdue, so we are playing catch up. “Covid has really put the health inequalities we face under the microscope. GPs working full time in this environment it is not sustainable. They will burn out because of the complexity and the amount of clinical issues and chronic diseases.” More here: https://bit.ly/3gLJR0f