Has GP care stayed in line?

Time after time in national surveys, the family doctor emerges as the most trusted of all professionals. But times are changing. As we report today, the salaries of GPs have shot up but the hours they put in have fallen sharply.

The night visit, even the traditional daytime home visit, have either vanished or been outsourced to locums and agencies.

At the surgery, much of the work once done by family doctors, including vaccinations, health monitoring and even minor surgical procedures, has been taken over by practice nurses.

Yet over the past three years salaries of GPs have soared from about £77,000 to today’s average of £100,000-plus.

The British Medical Association insists that “UK general practice offers unbeatable value for money.”

But it would, wouldn’t it? The BMA is nothing more than an upmarket trade union which has secured an amazing deal for its members.

Hard-pressed taxpayers who are footing the bill for this settlement are entitled to be suspicious.

Why has the Government paid so much for so little? How many NHS jobs have been cut as a result of throwing so much money at GP practices?

Above all, is the quality of service we get from GPs better or worse than it was when New Labour came to power nine years ago?

Statistics can prove anything. According to Mr Blair and his ministers, the NHS goes from strength to strength.

But the growing daily experience of patients is that their family doctor is not the familiar friend he or she used to be.

Getting an appointment to see the doctor can be a long, infuriating ordeal by automated switchboard, with no chance of an appointment outside a narrow, and usually inconvenient, window of a few hours.

No-one begrudges GPs reasonable hours, a decent salary and the trappings that go with it.

All we ask in return is a service that gets steadily better. We are not convinced it is happening.

Losing control on immigration

After the vandalism at Harmondsworth immigration centre yesterday, inmates have been moved to other centres.

To make space for them, 150 bogus asylum seekers and offenders have been released on bail.

They probably cannot believe their luck. Facing expulsion from the UK, most of those on bail will simply vanish into the underworld of the black economy and crime.

Politicians talk tough on immigration but here, as so many times before, is the soft, sloppy reality of a state which has lost control.