Med Cert Costs !

[Leec6.5]

Just asked my local GP practice the price for the Proforma and told £120 !!!! so having a look round to see what other options are available for me.

That works out at £2 a week over the course over the 5 years, that’s NOTHING why query it???

 

[slider]

I wonder how much of a difference there is between rural GPs and those in urban areas?

Our rural GP practices charges £220.
One of the GP's husband is a keen shooting man!

 

[slider]

The challenge for a GP surgery doing these is that only the GPs and some relatively limited other members of staff are fee earning whilst facility and support staff costs are high. The total costs to provide a service ten years ago were estimated to run around a £250 an hour break even point per GP, so doing ten minutes of GP work for £35, plus whatever admin staff time is used on the job is never going to make any kind of business sense unless there is unused capacity being paid for that can be monetised.

If you have a set up where all a doctor does all day is certificates from a home office without the same overheads a much lower charge out rate becomes viable, so long as they can get suitably efficient access to records.

I had a long chat in the pub with a few mates about this when the system was brought in as we thought it could be a good sideline to set up, but back then we couldn't find a way to make it viable at a competitive price. BASC then set up their own system which again when we looked at it would run at a loss unless it was using time and resources that would otherwise have been paid for without raising any income.

However if you go to someone like medcert the GP practice still has the admin work to do to provide your records and gets no income
Shooting themselves in the foot (pun intended)

 

[danny todorov]

My GP asked me to pay them £300 to sign off my medica report! bunch of ….. then I did it online with shootcert it was quick and efficient

 

[wb123]

However if you go to someone like medcert the GP practice still has the admin work to do to provide your records and gets no income
Shooting themselves in the foot (pun intended)

That is reasonably easy to price in.

If you have a situation where the practice have fee earner time sat going to waste that would otherwise be generating no income, dropping the price to get all the work or increasing barriers to using another provider makes sense, however having unused fee earner time should be virtually unheard of. Some places use the maximum time for providing records and/or provide them as a large printed stack, that adds a cost in time and money to the customer to post the records (which gets very expensive assuming you want your medical records sent reasonably securely) and increases the price at which the customer is better off buying the service in house.

If we assume a practice has a majority young healthy shooting population without significant records to review each report might take perhaps 10 minutes of fee earner time and 10 minutes of admin time. Lets assume only one in four get the practice to do it. That one report then has to pay for itself plus the admin time on the other three (10 mins a go) so a single report needs to be priced at least at 40 mins admin time plus 10 mins fee earner time.

If the business charges out the fee earner at £300 an hour and the admin at £40 an hour getting one in four at £75 a report becomes cost neutral versus losing the work at £55 if the fee earners time is otherwise fully utilised. If you have an older population with more extensive records that figure rapidly gets larger.

There was a point in time where a practice sending the records out would have to go over them anyway in order to check there was no need to redact certain types of information, this is now usually done with software which while less reliable reduces costs of sending records out. It also raises the question just how sure are we that all the relevant information was considered?

 

[Dalua]

Our rural GP practices charges £220.
One of the GP's husband is a keen shooting man!

I suppose his shooting has to be paid for somehow!

That works out at £2 a week over the course over the 5 years, that’s NOTHING why query it???

This sounds like sales-patter from the agent of a dubious loan company.

To me, wasting money is no more acceptable if I imagine wasting it weekly for a few years than wasting it all in one go.

 

[EMcC]

That works out at £2 a week over the course over the 5 years, that’s NOTHING why query it???

That would be good if | could choose the weeks I want to be active.

 

[Liveonce]

The more we pay the more it will increase, plus they have just seen the application fee significantly increase, GPs are not silly.

 

[Cass3224]

£30 a couple of months ago, between 2/3 week wait. North Lanarkshire

 

[teyhan1]

But the flip side of the coin is that we're not encumbered with having to apply for an annual hunting licence.

It does have its advantages though.

In Ireland it’s free to get the deer hunting license.
It’s all done online now.
Before you get your license, you have to input your cull numbers from the previous year.
They at least then know the minimum number of animals culled from which you could extrapolate approximate populations and distribution too.
Our new licenses also carry our photos and a declaration that you are hunting legally. So more ammunition should a poacher be caught.
The license takes about 5 minutes to complete online.

 

[VSS]

It does have its advantages though.

In Ireland it’s free to get the deer hunting license.
It’s all done online now.
Before you get your license, you have to input your cull numbers from the previous year.
They at least then know the minimum number of animals culled from which you could extrapolate approximate populations and distribution too.
Our new licenses also carry our photos and a declaration that you are hunting legally. So more ammunition should a poacher be caught.
The license takes about 5 minutes to complete online.

I would be very unhappy with that.
There's not many freedoms left in this country, and deer stalking is one of them.
I don't want to have to share my cull figures with anyone else. Going stalking is my escape from the overburdensome red tape of my "day job" as a farmer.