GPs demand: Force patients to pay to see us
Appointment charge is ‘only way to end NHS crisis’ Practices want advice on going ‘100% private’ Doctors defy warning it will hit poor and elderly
GPs will this week demand that NHS patients must pay for routine appointments, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Leading family doctors from across Britain will insist that charging patients for consultations is the only way to end the crisis in general practice – recently described by the British Medical Association as being ‘at breaking point’.
Desperate patients now routinely have to wait three weeks to see their doctor, while surgeries are struggling to recruit as GPs leave in droves.
The radical move, which would end the principle of an NHS free at the point of delivery, will be discussed at a major BMA conference in Edinburgh on Thursday.
Those behind the proposal argue charging for appointments will raise millions for the NHS – and discourage people with minor ailments from clogging up GP surgeries.
But opponents say charges will put the poor at greater risk of serious problems such as cancer going undetected.
And despite the stress of the job, many surgeries close at least once during the week, while The Mail on Sunday has previously found GPs ‘moonlighting’ by carrying out private work on evenings and weekends.
Among those in favour of charges is Shropshire Local Medical Committee, which represents GPs in the county.
In an official motion to be discussed at the BMA’s Local Medical Committees conference, it argues that the NHS must focus on reducing demand for GP appointments ‘and that the most effective way to do this would be to introduce a token “charge” for GP consultations’. To soften the blow it proposes ‘a mechanism to reimburse the elderly and those on low incomes’.
Similarly, Wiltshire LMC wants the BMA to give advice to doctors’ practices on how to ‘go 100 per cent private’ and demands that the union negotiates terms with the NHS to ‘support those patients who cannot afford to pay per consultation’.
Other countywide GP groups have put forward similar proposals. North Yorkshire LMC wants the BMA ‘to make steps to convert general practice into a private service’, while Cornwall and Isles of Scilly LMC ‘believes that “care free at the point of access” is strangling the 21st Century NHS’.
The proposals come as a poll conducted for The Mail on Sunday found four in ten people now favour some form of direct NHS user charging.
The National Centre for Social Research poll of almost 2,300 people found 33 per cent agreed that ‘the NHS should charge for some services’ such as GP services, if there were exemptions for groups such as children, the elderly and those on low incomes. A further six per cent believed the NHS should charge for some services, with no exceptions, bringing
‘General practice is at breaking point’
the total to 39 per cent. The remaining 61 per cent thought ‘all NHS services should be free to everybody at the point of use’.
Dr Prit Buttar, a GP based in Abingdon, Oxon, said GPs should charge for some appointments, such as during evenings and weekends. He added: ‘Patients should be prepared to pay as much as they would to see a lawyer, or even a plumber. I don’t think people understand the true cost of healthcare.’
Dr Nigel Watson, chief executive of Wessex LMCs, which includes Wiltshire, said about 150 GPs were quitting the NHS every week. One in eight GP posts is now empty, but applications are few, even though senior GPs earn more than £100,000 a year.
Other GP groups warn that forcing people to pay will be bad for patients’ health and that of the service at large.
Newcastle & North Tyneside LMC’s chief executive GP Dr George Rae said it would stop poorer people – who tend to suffer the worst health – seeing their doctors.
The Government has repeatedly stressed that it has no plans to introduce charges for GP consultations.
‘You should pay what you pay a plumber’