General practitioners complained to the city council this week about the mountain of requests for medical certificates on their desks. Amsterdammers who want or want to extend a certain permit are sent by civil servants to their GP for such a statement. But according to the GPs, this is often not necessary at all and they do not even consider it.
Have yourself re-inspected every two years because you are still dependent on an informal carer and his or her parking permit. A safety rail in the shower, a mobility scooter or a declaration of urgency for a social rental home.
Daphne Tabak, general practitioner in the Tweede Oosterparkstraat and ambassador of the National Association of General Practitioners in Amsterdam, has a pile of examples from colleagues on her desk. She spoke to the city council this week to draw attention to the unnecessary red tape in times when GPs are already overworked.
Tabak: “If you have a spinal cord injury, those are things that will not go away. So the wheelchair-bound patient will remain wheelchair-bound and will continue to need caregivers from now until the distant future – and those caregivers will also continue to need a parking permit.”
In addition, something goes wrong in the communication between the citizen and the municipality, the GPs note, because nine times out of ten it is not the personal GP who has to make such an assessment, but an independent third doctor.
“That’s actually to keep the doctor/patient relationship good, that you don’t make any statements about what someone can or can’t do. For this purpose, company doctors and insurance doctors can request information from the GP,” Tabak explains.
Responsible alderman Alexander Scholtes (Health care, D66) shows sensitivity to the argument of the GPs. “I want to talk to them further and spread this message widely within the municipality to see what we can do about this,” says Scholtes.