Doctors’ exodus pushes surgeries ‘to the brink’
GP SERVICES are on the verge of collapse and desperately need more investment, one of the country’s leading doctors warned last night.
Professor Helen Stokes Lampard said surgeries are struggling to cope with demand following an exodus of GPs who have either retired or quit because of increasing workloads.
And she said if the problems continue the NHS itself could collapse.
Pressures
Prof Stokes-Lampard, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said: “Things are very precarious in general practice and we are at a tipping point.”
She added: “It’s got to the point where it’s fallen over in many places. Take Brighton for example. Last year seven practices handed back their contracts. They couldn’t get enough GPs so they were forced to lock up and hand back the keys.
“And there are examples of that all over the country.
“The simple fact is we haven’t got enough doctors and we haven’t got enough health care professionals.
“We have to fix this or we lose the NHS – I think the stakes are that high. Because if every general practitioner shut up shop today, within two days the NHS would be over because hospitals just couldn’t cope.”
Workload in general practice grew by 16 per cent over the past seven years, a study found. In 2015/16, there were 372.5million consultations.
The increased workload is thought to be due to the UK’s growing and ageing population and more patients living with long-term, complex conditions. The RCGP, which blames decreasing investment and the workforce not keeping pace with demand, has called for 8,000 more GPs in England and 10,000 across the UK.
NHS England has promised an extra £2.4billion a year for general practice and 5,000 more support staff but has yet to deliver.
Prof Stokes-Lampard said a free NHS was “doable” but claimed rationing of treatment was “inevitable”, adding: “We need more money and we need to be honest about rationing.”
NHS England’s general practice forward review, published last year, said: “GPs are by far the largest branch of British medicine... as a recent British Medical Journal headline put it – ‘If general practice fails, the whole NHS fails’. So rather than ignore these real pressures, the NHS has at last begun openly acknowledging them. We need to act.”