“I have a sneaking suspicion it will all come back to GPs who are already inundated anyway,” sighs one doctor. Pressure is mounting on a primary care system already splitting at the seams in Greater Manchester, GPs, community nurses and hospital medics alike have warned.
The official narrative is that the country is now ‘living safely with Covid’, and that the focus for the NHS should be getting delayed surgeries back on course - correcting a colossal backlog of operations built up through two years of stop-start procedures. But hospital staff have spoken out to the Manchester Evening News , fearing ‘another Omicron’ will hit their wards , after New Year marked among the most challenging moments of the pandemic for NHS workers. Staffing was stretched so thin that many felt the situation unsafe.
Now, GPs and community care staff in the region share their side of the story, as they ‘feel Covid pressure start to rise again’, while also trying to cope under the weight of millions of sick patients whose treatment could be years away.
