Martin Marshall: GPs need to do less, but it’s not what patients want to hear | Denis Campbell The new chair of the RCGP says doctors are under pressure to overtreat, and calls on politicians to stem the exodus from the profession
The NHS does too much medicine”. These are surprising words to hear uttered by a GP, given their role as gatekeepers to the NHS – the doctors who send patients to hospital for tests, surgery or other treatment.
But Martin Marshall, the new chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, firmly believes that part of the reason the NHS is so overstretched is that doctors (GPs and hospital doctors) overdiagnose illness – and as a result patients have too many exploratory tests and too many unnecessary treatments. Getting a grip on that, he believes, would help relieve the pressure on the health service in general and the nation’s overworked family doctors in particular. The Guardian
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