Hospital medics and GPs have described how delays of up to four days to get a test and five days to receive the result forces them to isolate and means they cannot work normally in the NHS.
A dossier of cases being collated by the Doctors’ Association UK discloses how a male GP in Margate in Kent who was displaying symptoms was told to travel
266 miles to Leeds in West Yorkshire to have a test.
In another case a hospital doctor in Basildon, Essex, had to undertake a
500-mile round trip to Glenfield hospital in Leicester. When the occupational health department at his NHS trust could not provide a test they advised him to use the test and trace website instead.
“I had to try for 36 hours to get a slot and then that involved a 250-mile drive, which my partner had to take a day off work to do.
“I then had to
isolate while waiting for a result, which took
five days, during which my colleagues had to cover me. Utter shambles,” he said.
A GP in Brighton and her partner, who is a doctor in a hospital, both had to
isolate for eight days due to her inability to get a test locally for four days, despite checking availability several times a day.
“Once I finally went to get tested, it took a further four days to get the result. My whole family were isolating for this period; that’s a GP and hospital doctor who are unable to see patients whilst waiting for testing and results,” she said.
Family doctors are disadvantaged in the search for tests because, unlike hospitals, GP surgeries do not have occupational departments, which could organise a test for them.
Dr Rinesh Parmar, the chair of the DAUK, said: “The current arrangements for Covid-19 testing are an utter shambles. We have key workers, such as GPs and hospital doctors, who are unable to access testing, having to self-isolate and ultimately not see patients.
“With an already stretched NHS workforce and 8,274 doctor vacancies in England alone prior to the pandemic, we can ill afford to have doctors self-isolating due to a lack of available testing.”