This morning my group had a lecture from the fabulous Miss Sue and Shelly. These women talked a great deal about the ins and outs of General Practice and how it works. This past week I have been hearing about GPs without really having a good understanding of what they are but after their session with us, I left with the knowledge of how things run and what GP is all about. Starting off I learned that their training hub covers 180 GPs in Birmingham, which I find quite amazing. I don’t think that there are even half that amount from Pittsburgh that are all trained the same and are consistent. Following their discussion on the training procedures and how GPs can be qualified under their training hub, they talked about the different roles of the nurses over here in the UK. For instance, they have district nurses, that go into homes and help people with dressings or shots or help them with whatever medical need they have from the comfort of their own home. We have nurses and therapists that do home visits back in the United States and for the life of me I can not recall their specific title, but I do know that they are not referred to as District nurses. In addition to the topic of the different types of providers, we learned a lot about primary care. This can be thought of as the front door of the NHS, which I think is quite brilliant. Some things that primary care takes care of is general practice, community nurses, pharmacy, dental, and optometry. Sue and Shelly said that this type of care can be considered “womb to tomb”, because it covers everything from prenatal healthcare all the way up to geriatrics.

As well as discussing the primary functions of GPs and Primary Care, they also informed us all on how the Nationale Health Service is funded and how the people feel about this type of funding. The NHS is primarily funded by the government by general taxes. All of the adult-age workers in England pay a national insurance contribution, which a small amount goes helps funds the NHS. There are privately funded offices such as GP surgeons that are independently owned businesses and can cost money to seek services provided by them. before the year of 2004 there was not a contract of any source for the GPs under the NHS. They simply applied to join the medical list and agreed to follow their rules. Although many people are happy about not having to pay for services, they are upset about the slow wait times for any sort of service from their GPs. According to Sue and Shelly, one can wait for up to two hours for an ambulance, which would most likely result in a lawsuit over in the states shall that occur. After lunch these women had put together a really fun game for the group to place and go over everything that we learned in the morning session. I think that it was a great idea to really engage us students and reinforce everything that we have learned in a positive way that involves movement and creativity. I am very tired after a long day yet I can not wait to wake up tomorrow for Stratford on Avon.