Donnez-moi un break: Despite all this, Playbook did not find many Tory MPs — even those who are particularly alive to the concerns of lower-income voters — up in arms over the PM’s holiday. One said: “He deserves a break. There is never a good time for a PM to take one, so my gut feel is that I hope he has a decent rest for a few days and comes back raring to go.”
More on that: There’s another whole week before the Commons returns from conference recess, despite the fact the SNP has already got its (virtual) conference out the way. It falls to the Lords to quiz the government on energy prices, social care and climate change this week.
HEALTH WARNING
HEEBIE GPs: Headlines of the kind the government really didn’t want to see today, as the Mail splashes on analysis which suggests there is only one GP per 2,000 patients in some parts of the country. Martin Beckford reports on research commission by the Lib Dems which shows the number of people per GP in England has risen by 5 percent to an average of 2,038 since 2015, while 70 of 113 Clinical Commissioning Group areas in England have seen an increase in the number of people per GP since 2015.
in the i, Paul Gallagher highlights a staffing crisis among nurses, with some hospitals struggling to keep open wards for patients neing major surgery. The Royal College of Nursing tells Paul many trusts are simply unable to cope phone number library with a backlog of patients amid a nurse vacancy rate of around 40,000 while extra staff brought back from retirement to help with the pandemic are now leaving.
This is going to hurt: As your Playbook
author wrote last week, MPs are pretty worri about what will happen if patients do not see improvements in treatment after they vot to raise taxes to fund the NHS, with GP waiting times in particular becoming a postbag twitter share on facebook share on linkin pressure point.
Saj’s prescription: Playbook hears a shake-up of GPs’ responsibilities could be announc this week, possibly as soon as tomorrow. The Sunday Times’ Caroline Wheeler report yesterday that the health secretary wants to free hindirectory up GPs to spend time with patients by getting pharmacists to write more prescriptions. Doctors who do not increase the number of patients they are seeing face to face could even be sanction, Wheeler says.
Sick note: This might not go down very well with doctors themselves. On the front of the Guardian, Denis Campbell reveals that NHS staff say they are facing a “growing tide of abuse” including assaults from patients, which they say is being caus by frustration at long waits for care. A senior mical leader tells him: “As we come out of the pandemic there is a noticeable change in the political rhetoric away from thanking and supporting the NHS to demanding that it now delivers the recovery of services.