Sick or Fit notes?

Welcome to a series of blogs that have been created by our medical team. We hope you find them useful.

Sick notes, doctors are now supposed to call them "fit notes", but as a patient requires them usually when "sick", they are still colloquially known as "sick notes". How confusing; a bit like navigating medical healthcare, as a doctor it seemed outwardly quite simple, book an appointment and then see the health care professional and get the outcome you hoped or that the professional thought was best for you. Right? Well, not quite.

Now, as a patient, I have found myself baffled by the process of NHS healthcare. I'm not blaming the professionals or admin team that are running the service, it's just in my opinion, the NHS is such a huge, unwieldy vessel, that efficiency and service have, despite best intentions, been left far behind as a distant memory. I am sadly not blessed with the answers, but despite whatever your beliefs about the NHS, it is clear that the system needs support, and by using services like DrNote to facilitate this, can only be of help.

The system of General Practice in the NHS is utterly overwhelmed, as of November 2023, NHS General Practice got paid £164.64 per year per registered patient, about 45 pence per person per day! There's not a whole lot you can do for that in the real world. This is not a political posting, but merely a thought provoking page, and whilst clearly there are folk out there who cannot afford to pay for a private service, in my mind it seems that those who can afford to use a private service may feel that it enables them to both help themselves, and help the wider NHS and public by removing pressures from a bursting-at-the-seams NHS.