How the pandemic has helped to improve patient choice
It’s difficult to look at the global Covid pandemic and try to find a silver lining to the dark cloud it brought into our lives for the better part of two years, but if there is one then I think it’s a shift in the way we have begun to think about how we manage our health.
In my last blog I talked briefly about how lack of access to clinical care during lockdown had prompted people to search for alternative options for symptom management in cases of chronic and/or terminal conditions, particularly Parkinson’s Disease.
A year ago, leading cancer charity Cancer Research UK released a report suggesting that around a third of all cancer patients had had an appointment, test or assessment cancelled during the previous 18 months.
This came six months after the charity had estimated that lockdown had resulted in 40,000 people experiencing a delay to the start of their treatment.
This, remember, relates only to one disease. A quick scan of Google reveals a similar picture emerging for heart disease, diabetes, and a raft of other serious conditions, so it’s not hard to imagine the exponential effect the pandemic had on providing care for less acute cases.
Lockdown triggered the immediate closure of GP surgeries up and down the country. In place of face-to-face consultations with your doctor, telephone triage systems were put in place.
To begin with, and in the face of an unpredictable, unknown, and apparently deadly virus, most of us probably understood the need to protect GPs. If they became infected, then the entire system of local healthcare would fail.
Since then, and over the last year or more, the vaccination programme has been successfully rolled out, the mortality rate associated with the virus has dropped to levels that are, at worst, unremarkable, and all legal restrictions on us have been removed.
Living with Covid is the new normal. Yet despite NHS advice to GPs to reopen their doors and resume in-person consultations, many if not most doctors’ surgeries have retained their triage systems to assess patient need, meaning that although getting a face-to-face appointment with your GP is no longer be impossible, it’s certainly far from easy.
But this has had a surprising and unforeseen consequence.
There are now growing numbers of people who have become so frustrated or disillusioned with the service they’re receiving from their local GP that they have begun to explore other care options – including private GP services, complementary treatment, and alternative medicine.
Of course, it’s unfortunate that it has taken the withdrawal of care (or impaired access to it) to force people to look elsewhere for their healthcare needs, and I have long advocated for the NHS, Public Health England, and the National Institute for Clinical Health Excellence (NICE) to ensure every patient is aware of the additional non-clinical treatments that may be available to them.
However, what we now have is a much more engaged community of people who, whether through curiosity or frustration, have become open to the possibility that clinical care alone may not be the only, or even the best, option for managing their health.
This can only be a good thing.
For a start, the process of exploring what the non-clinical health sector has to offer means people will necessarily become even more informed about symptom management, the role lifestyle plays in either mitigating or exacerbating their condition, how the benefits of many clinical treatments might be enhanced through complementary treatment, and how this ‘care portfolio’ approach to healthcare can leave them with a greater sense of control.
But this also opens up a path of greater and more instinctive collaboration between clinical care practitioners and their counterparts in the private, complementary, and alternative health sectors.
As patients increasingly dictate some of the terms under which they receive their care – e.g. insisting that their acupuncturist or physiotherapist or hypnotherapist is looped into the care plan – so clinicians will need to assess and measure the true value of those therapies and treatments in the context of patient rehabilitation, recovery, and management.
It is at this stage that we will truly begin to see an integrative framework of care emerge, and, potentially, the beginnings of a publicly funded approach to care that is genuinely collaborative and complementary.
If you’d like to know more about the role acupuncture can play in your clinical health journey, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you and explain more about the health benefits this traditional Chinese treatment can deliver.