Lazy docs make me feel sick!

HOW many people have a story about a loved one who might still be alive had their GP a) SPOTTED they were ill, b) DONE something about it and c) BEEN AROUND when their condition worsened, instead of offloading them on to some faceless agency that knew nothing about their medical history and cared even less?

My dad might still be alive today if HIS GP had spotted the early signs of bowel cancer (incredible he hadn't, as they were pinned on his surgery wall) and sent him to a specialist.

How many of us feel conned and betrayed by GPs who in the past three years have had a 63 per cent pay hike? Their average earnings in 2006 were £118,000, while some pocketed a staggering £250,000, in return for which they have shaved funds off patient care and drastically cut their working hours.

There was a time, not so long ago, when GPs took responsibility for their patients 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Now, if you're unlucky enough to fall ill after 6.30pm, at weekends or on bank holidays your fate is put into the hands of a doctor you don't know and who often doesn't have access to your medical notes or doctors are flown in, at 3,000 quid a throw, from some far-flung corner of Europe.

Worse still, you could end up on the phone to a nurse who knows as much about your condition as the bloke in your local kebab shop.

And despite pleas from the government that in return for their six-figure salaries GPs might like to reinstate a teensy bit of overtime to help patients who say seeing their own GPs makes them feel less scared. Despite the fact one presumes these doctors have a vocation and actually give a damn about the fate of their patients, many are refusing to budge from their new 9 to 5 lives—whatever distress that might cause people in their care.

They've hit the jackpot and nothing as trivial as a patient's terror is going to change that.

And now, guess what? They want our help. Having betrayed not only their patients but the whole ethos of what being a GP is all about, they want us to help them fight government plans to close 1,700 GPs' surgeries in favour of superclinics that would be run as a commercial enterprise.

Obscene

And yes, they're right to shout that it will affect patient care. They're right to say it will leave thousands of sick, vulnerable people without direct access to a doctor. But they need to ask themselves whose fault all that is. It's THEIRS!

Had they heeded requests to justify their huge salaries with a few hours' overtime. Had they not insisted on taking an increasingly obscene share of NHS funds. Had they not used much of that extra funding to boost their own salaries instead of using it to improve services, the government would not now be forced to save money by opening superclinics.

And while GPs will end up the losers, the biggest losers here will be the sick, the frail and the vulnerable who already get passed from pillar to post like some pesky inconvenience. And who even if they ARE forced to go to superclinics could not feel any more isolated, abandoned and terrified than they do now.

Maybe some of those doctors who think a fat salary is more important than patient care ought to re-read the Hippocratic Oath—the supposed guideline for the medical ethics of doctors. There's a line in there that says: "I will use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability."

Nowhere does it say that help should only be given for a six-figure salary and be limited to office hours from Monday to Friday.

Trying to kid

SO, it isn't just Kate and Gerry McCann who have refused to go back to Portugal for a police reconstruction of Maddie's disappearance.

We now learn that at least four of the Tapas Seven have also refused because they too left their kids alone when they went drinking that fateful night.

Are they worried that like the McCanns, they might also become suspects?

Er, so what happened to the "We'll do whatever's necessary to find Maddie" mantra? Did that come with the proviso that they'll do "whatever's necessary" as long as it doesn't embarrass them, inconvenience them or put them in any personal danger?

Anyway, I don't see the problem. If these people have nothing to hide, if they really DO want to help find Maddie, why haven't they already hauled their backsides back to Portugal?

I've a spring in my stepWHEN Louis Walsh and I ended up singing a duet at our works Christmas Party (it was the worst ever rendition of Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe) I told him Bruce Springsteen was my all-time rock god.

Louis said he was coming to Dublin in May and would try to get me and The Husband tickets. Yeah, yeah, I thought, he’ll forget as soon as the euphoria of our duet (and the wine) had worn off. But true to his word, Louis (now officially my hero) got us within feet of The Boss at the RDS Arena in Dublin last Sunday night.

A week later my eardrums are still ringing and I’ve just about recovered from the soaking we got when the heavens opened.

But I can’t stop humming Dancing In The Dark and the word “magic” keeps going through my head. So Thank You, Bruce, Thank You, Dublin and Thank You, Louis!