VIRUS: STOP ORDERING MEDICINES YOU DON’T NEED

Public urged to not order unnecessary prescriptions

By Bill Heaney

GPs and Pharmacists across Greater Glasgow and Clyde have faced a high demand for prescriptions since the COVID-19 outbreak began.

The Health Board is urging patients to not request or fill unnecessary repeat prescriptions.

GP practices and community pharmacies continue to operate. Patients are asked to phone in the first instance for any queries that are not coronavirus-related. For any patients with coronavirus symptoms, they are urged to consult NHS Inform or call NHS24 on 111.

Alan Harrison, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, said: “A huge thank you to all GP practice and community pharmacy teams who continue to care for patients in extremely challenging circumstances.

“But they are facing an unnecessary strain because individuals are requesting and filling prescriptions when they do not need to.

“That’s why we’re asking the public to please help us and not order unnecessary prescriptions. We’re all in this together.”

Dumbarton and Vale of Leven Health Centres.

The years of austerity and the relentless shift towards the corporate denizens who extract every last penny on behalf of the elites is now being exposed. And for that we will all suffer, and die.

By way of example on the 6th of February 2020 HM Government published full page public health adverts in the Scottish press to say that it and the NHS were well prepared for the virus – and to say that the public could help by sneezing into a tissue, disposing of same and by washing hands.

With the adverts being run again a week later it is absolutely outrageous how things have changed in a matter of weeks. So what were these adverts about. Either they were examples of sheer and utter incompetence or were example of adverts deliberately designed to deceive, to mislead the public. I prefer the latter.

The NHS is not well prepared. It is short on face masks type 2 and 3, short on PPE, short on ventilators, short on testing kits. The NHS in England is short of 10,000 doctors and 40,000 nurses with levels way below for example Germany. ( think Vale out of hours GP closures and you get a similar but lesser picture here)

Viral outbreaks are, even with new or novel viruses relatively well understood. Epidemiology is a science, as is statistics, as is virology itself, as is public health strategies. With all of the data from China, then from Italy and in fact from previous viral outbreaks covering MERS, SARS, Ebola, the Zika virus, and of course the holocaust of the 1918 so called Spanish flu where between 50 and 100 million died, it is incredible to think that we are as unprepared as we are.

So why were we told we were prepared when we are so shy of resources and equipment. Why did we, and America disregard the World Health Organisation advice to test, test test, trace trace trace and contain.

Well I think we will find the answer in the comment attributed to Dominic Cummings where at a UK safety group meeting at Downing Street it was reported that ….

“… this is all about herd immunity, protect the economy, and if a few pensioners die to bad “

Not dissimilar to President Trump declaring that the virus was a hoax it now becomes clear that to protect the economy, our Westminster Government actually wanted the virus to spread in the flawed thinking that they could quickly develop herd immunity. But the greedy incompetent money men’s thinking started to unravel on the 15th March 2020 when wiser scientific counsel prevailed with modelling that showed that the UK under the herd immunity policy was on a trajectory for over half a million deaths in a very short space of time.

And now, too little too late, and under prepared and under resourced UK waits it’s grizzly fate. The mega city of London is now the epicentre of the epidemic. Just beginning the triage rules are already that anyone over the age of sixty will only receive palliative care – as meanwhile they frantically build 2,000 capacity temporary morgues.

And will we in Scotland be any better. Maybe slightly better due to our being behind London in the outbreak and because we are now belatedly socially distancing.

The horror has just begun and it will hit hard in areas like Dumbarton with its level of poor health, high levels of unemployment and deprivation generally. Unlike Prince Charles free to flee to Scotland with his wife and entourage of over seventy assistants, secretaries and minders, we will not be at the head of the NHS priority queue for testing and treatment.

One comment

Willie says:

March 28, 2020 at 10:42 am

The years of austerity and the relentless shift towards the corporate denizens who extract every last penny on behalf of the elites is now being exposed. And for that we will all suffer, and die.

By way of example on the 6th of February 2020 HM Government published full page public health adverts in the Scottish press to say that it and the NHS were well prepared for the virus – and to say that the public could help by sneezing into a tissue, disposing of same and by washing hands.

With the adverts being run again a week later it is absolutely outrageous how things have changed in a matter of weeks. So what were these adverts about. Either they were examples of sheer and utter incompetence or were example of adverts deliberately designed to deceive, to mislead the public. I prefer the latter.

The NHS is not well prepared. It is short on face masks type 2 and 3, short on PPE, short on ventilators, short on testing kits. The NHS in England is short of 10,000 doctors and 40,000 nurses with levels way below for example Germany. ( think Vale out of hours GP closures and you get a similar but lesser picture here)

Viral outbreaks are, even with new or novel viruses relatively well understood. Epidemiology is a science, as is statistics, as is virology itself, as is public health strategies. With all of the data from China, then from Italy and in fact from previous viral outbreaks covering MERS, SARS, Ebola, the Zika virus, and of course the holocaust of the 1918 so called Spanish flu where between 50 and 100 million died, it is incredible to think that we are as unprepared as we are.

So why were we told we were prepared when we are so shy of resources and equipment. Why did we, and America disregard the World Health Organisation advice to test, test test, trace trace trace and contain.

Well I think we will find the answer in the comment attributed to Dominic Cummings where at a UK safety group meeting at Downing Street it was reported that ….

“… this is all about herd immunity, protect the economy, and if a few pensioners die to bad “

Not dissimilar to President Trump declaring that the virus was a hoax it now becomes clear that to protect the economy, our Westminster Government actually wanted the virus to spread in the flawed thinking that they could quickly develop herd immunity. But the greedy incompetent money men’s thinking started to unravel on the 15th March 2020 when wiser scientific counsel prevailed with modelling that showed that the UK under the herd immunity policy was on a trajectory for over half a million deaths in a very short space of time.

And now, too little too late, and under prepared and under resourced UK waits it’s grizzly fate. The mega city of London is now the epicentre of the epidemic. Just beginning the triage rules are already that anyone over the age of sixty will only receive palliative care – as meanwhile they frantically build 2,000 capacity temporary morgues.

And will we in Scotland be any better. Maybe slightly better due to our being behind London in the outbreak and because we are now belatedly socially distancing.

The horror has just begun and it will hit hard in areas like Dumbarton with its level of poor health, high levels of unemployment and deprivation generally. Unlike Prince Charles free to flee to Scotland with his wife and entourage of over seventy assistants, secretaries and minders, we will not be at the head of the NHS priority queue for testing and treatment.

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