Conversation Upgrade #3 - Extra Funding for Same-Day GP Appointments for Urgent Care

The UK government recently announced a £500 million large sum of money increase for funding same-day GP appointments for urgent care.

This was also covered in the media including by the BBC: "GPs told to guarantee same-day appointments for urgent cases".

Respect, and Gratitude but Can We Do Better?

I have a lot of respect and gratitude for the BBC and the journalists¹ for the work they do. And for everyone in government. For every health care provider. And for every patient.

But we can have a better conversation than this.

What's striking for me is that lack of engaging with and surfacing the fundamental reality of the health care service as it currently exists.

Where are the top 10 data trends and the stories that bring them to life?

Where's the depth of the issue?

Contextualising Big Numbers: £ per Person

I'm not sure of the different routes for exploring this. The first thing I did was try to make it more relatable by expressing it as £ per person because again large numbers being almost meaningless.

In this case UK healthcare primary care budget change 485 million £ could be expressed as: UK healthcare primary care budget change per person 7 £ per person.

£7 per person?!

When I calculated that I thought I'd broken WikiSim. No, £500 million / 70 million people is £7 per person. Okay. Now I know that many people do not need to see their GP every year.

Actually, do I know that? No I don't. How many people do not need to see the GP every year? I have no idea! Let's park that for now.

£ per Person Versus Budget

What about we look at how much the UK government is currently spending per person? Alas I after 10 minutes of searching I could not find a cleaned data source for this. I've made a stub with what I've found so far so one day someone might fill it in: UK budget.²

Other Unasked, Unanswered Questions

How many GPs do we have? What service is currently provided.

What service do we need? How many GPs do we need to deliver that service?

Need?

And what do we define as "need"? Because we... at this point my friends and family know what comes next. We all die at some point. This is the underlying "problem" that is not being engaged with skillfully. Yes there are all sorts of low hanging fruit in primary care that should be picked as well but we also have to factor in the full spectrum of human impermanent existence so that we can hope to answer the question: What service do we need?

Can This Conversation Be Upgraded? Not Yet.

This is the third post in this series and the second that I've not managed to get to a point of feeling like there's some meaningfully positive insight which is now available to upgrade all conversations with.

That's honest. True. I'm not disappointed because this is a complex system I know very little about.

There's also some fundamental data sets like the UK budget which I assume after another 20 minutes of digging and a couple hours of cleaning, preparing, uploading, tweaking with, would be ready to use in a calculation to take it up a step.

I'm not sure what the view would be from that step up. Would a peak of an insight be visible or would you still be staring at the slope of the wisdom mountain as it disappears over its own curvature?

I'll keep trying.