Wales needs to invest in primary care

AS UKIP’s shadow secretary for health and wellbeing one of my earliest tasks was to highlight the Welsh Government’s lack of investment in primary care and the impact this was having on our GPs.

We spend nearly eight billion pounds a year on health and social care in Wales, around half the total Welsh Budget, yet primary care sees less than 8% of that.

The Royal College of GPs believe we should be spending at least 11%.

There is also a staffing shortage. We are training just over half the GPs we need each year. The BMA state we need to train 200 GPs, this year we will train 124.

The strain this is putting on our GPs is immense; some GPs are being forced to see in excess of 100 patients in a session. This is not good for the patient and certainly not good for the GP.

The strain this places on doctors is forcing many to quit general practice altogether.

Residents of Porthcawl recently experienced first-hand the effects of a GP leaving general practice when Dr Eales closed his Victoria Avenue Surgery. His patients had to join other GP practices nearby, putting more strain on those practices.

Unless we recruit more GPs, this situation is going to happen more frequently.

A quarter of our GPs in Wales are over 50 so we need to be planning for their retirement. The Welsh Government have recently undertaken a recruitment campaign which has improved the situation slightly, but it’s not enough.

We have to invest more in primary care and encourage more young people to consider a career in general practice, otherwise we’ll see more and more practices closing down.