Helen Salisbury: Bank holiday blues

Bank holidays are always a bit of a headache in general practice. The demand from patients doesn’t go down but is, instead, squeezed into fewer days of the week. Most bank holidays fall on a Monday, and each organisation will have devised its own rules to try to ensure fairness—otherwise, someone who doesn’t normally work on that day will miss their extra holiday and feel hard done by.GPs are used to organising our way around expected holidays, but having one sprung on us at a week’s notice is a new challenge that has caused much grief to the GP community. There doesn’t seem to have been any national plan, and it was left to each practice to decide individually whether or not to open. We were probably in a lose-lose situation: if we closed we would have been portrayed (again) as lazy; if we remained open we would have been…
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