The NHS is currently under immense pressure and we have limited resources to look after our patients. Therefore we must dedicate our NHS resources to looking after the medical needs of our patients.
We get a large numbers of requests from a wide range of organisations or charities asking us to confirm a patient is safe to do a certain task or to justify why they may need special treatment and so on. Very often we do not feel it is appropriate for us to respond to these either because we do not have the expert knowledge to do this accurately or because it is a way for that organisation to ration their own resources. It may also be that they are trying to absolve their responsibility for health and safety in some way. We would prefer that these organisations find a different way to fulfil their requirements – that way we can focus all our time and resource on helping patients with their medical needs.
I hope you see that this is not a good use of GP time and support us. In the current climate in the NHS, we cannot use our time and resources to do these reports when we need all our time and skill to treat patients who are unwell.