New Lyminge Surgery

Growing problems.

I've been with the practice for 31 years. In recent years, the current GPs have spent a lot of time away from the practice. The vacuum has been filled by locums an ever expanding administrative team. Personal information is leaked and discussed and people with minimal qualifications have been given inappropriate power over patients, without full training on patient care. Anonymous text messages, some with devastating and stress provoking information are incessant, without guidance on what to do about them. Patients are treated as nuisances to be managed like a production line. As an increasingly disabled person who is obliged to take multiple medications, I have a long established routine of blood tests designed to balance the need for blood tests with the substantial risks to me from respiratory infections between October and February/March. The pharmacy technician now polices these abusively, getting a subordinate to send stress inducing anonymous messages, opportunistically legitimised using locum GPs to threaten to immediately stop DMARD medication unless the patient immediately takes a blood test at a public phlebotomy clinic, when an appropriate test is already booked. She did this in December 2023 to 2024 while my usual GP was on maternity leave and sought authority to write to me with the same threats as soon as my GP returned, causing extreme stress which was reflected in the blood test, which then had to be repeated. When my GP returned to reviewing me monthly, I resumed taking routine blood tests. Rheumatology had no concerns about the routine and told me they would write to the practice to say it was never appropriate to abruptly stop the DMARD. My GP has again gone on maternity leave. I fully intended to take a blood test in October and booked it for the first time my usual phlebotomist was back from holiday. Despite this, I was sent a text saying the DMARD and another antiinflammatory drug prescribed my GP at the time which does not require blood test monitoring would not be prescribed, authorised by a locum doctor I've never met. I do have an extremely stressful, painful life and stopping these drugs is dangerous - they can stop working - and inflicts unnecessary pain Stopping the GP described antiinflammatory can only be calculated to cause pain. That kind of increase in pain and inflammation keeps me in bed, unable to feed or wash myself. I was distraught and feeling unsafe and coercively controlled when I called the surgery to demand that they did not do this to me, especially on the authorisation of administrative staff and a locum GP. I was fully aware all calls are recorded, but I called in a state of extreme distress and fear, which I feel was fully predictable given the harm that was being deliberately and needlessly inflicted. I'm sure it wasn't pretty. The surgery's response has been from another GP who has recently returned from a sabbatical of several years He invited me to meet him, in a month's time. He has since refused to see me and sent me my first ever warning from the NHS which he has headed "Final warning," and is prominent on my medical records, and he has ended the long standing shared care agreement with rheumatology, which requires them to post me paper prescriptions and take them to a chemist - when all my other prescriptions are electronically sent and delivered to me, because I am extremely vulnerable to respiratory infections. This, too, was surely foreseen and certainly foreseeable. I want to leave the surgery, but catchment area rules prevent me from doing so - and after 31 years of previously good relations, I have a choice - accept coercively controlling abuse or go without a GP and vital medications, which will kill me quite quickly. This is the repulsive effect of years of right wing government pushing "managers" into the NHS in place of care, dignity and mutual respect.