GPs won’t give your children jabs any more
FAMILY doctors will no longer carry out vaccinations under Scottish Government plans to ease the workload of GPs.
Instead, vaccination teams will be established to deliver immunisation programmes.
The radical change to the way babies, children and adults will be protected against serious diseases was announced by Health Secretary Shona Robison yesterday.
It was one of a number of funding announcements designed to help family doctors cope with increasing workloads, which the Government was warned is pushing the system to breaking point.
Addressing the BMA’s Scottish Local Medical Committee conference in Clydebank, Dunbartonshire, Miss Robison said: ‘We want to find ways to enable other parts of the system to be responsible for the delivery of vaccination programmes and we want to work with you and NHS boards to do that.’
She continued: ‘The vaccination transformation programme will draw in expertise from across the NHS and will take around three years to complete.
‘It is a complex piece of work impacting every person in Scotland so we need to get it right.’
Miss Robison said the move was part of a wider effort to design a ‘new role’ for GPs in which they will provide ‘complex care’. She also insisted the Scottish Government is committed to reinvigorating general practice in a bid to attract more people into the profession.
A contract is being negotiated by the BMA and the Government to reduce doctors’ workload and improve their terms and conditions. Extra funding was also promised to help with GP recruitment, reimbursing the costs of completing GP appraisals and to increase the amount of money a practice can claim to help pay for locum cover.
Miss Robison promised £251million of the £500million investment in primary care announced last year will directly support general practices by 2021.
In response to the announcement to move away from GP practices providing immunisation programmes, Dr Alan McDevitt, chairman of the BMA’s Scottish GP committee, said: ‘This is a very positive step towards our shared vision of general practice. We have to make sure there is no risk to the public and that we maintain rates [of immunisation].’
Dr McDevitt had earlier warned about pressures on GPs.
Addressing delegates, he said that almost a quarter of practices have at least one GP vacancy.
Meanwhile, 32 per cent of GP training places remain unfilled and a third of GPs are planning to retire in the next five years. ‘There has never been a more important time, a more pressing need for change,’ Dr McDevitt said.
Delegates also voiced concerns about workload pressures. Dr John Ip, a GP in Glasgow, said: ‘I’m calling for urgent action, because that is what we need. We are frogs being boiled alive in a pot. It’s reached a stage now that it is potentially compromising patient care.’