Complaint
A listener complained that an interview with a doctor in Bristol may have inadvertently implied that the whole of the UK Health Visiting (HV) service, rather than the service in her area alone, was closed to referrals.Β The ECU considered whether the interview met the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ’s standards for due accuracy which are set out in its Editorial Guidelines.
Outcome
The presenter Justin Webb was in Bristol and introduced a number of reports looking at issues from the perspective of people from the surrounding area.Β He interviewed a GP based in the south of the city who gave her perspective on the health service and the pressures GPs were under.Β The comment which prompted the complaint came during a section where the GP, Dr Rachel Warrington, described her experience during lockdown.
In lockdown we were seeing patients with Covid in the car park. We were in out-of- date PPE and homemade scrubs, in the car park, seeing Covid patients. We were seeing patients face to face. Even though it was telephone triage, I was still bringing patients in. We were still diagnosing cancers, we were still referring for two week waits. Along with that, a lot of the services around us didn’t take referrals. So, mental health, we were dealing with really severe mental health. Health visitors, the dementia team, they all shut to referrals, so we were the ones dealing with it. We vaccinated 32,000 patients locally and I don’t understand why there’s such negative rhetoric around GPs.
In the ECU’s view Dr Warrington was talking about her experience and the circumstances in her particular surgery, explaining what happened with her patients. The language she used reinforced the sense she was talking about local services. The evidence did not therefore support the inference made by the complainant.
Not Upheld