We won’t be scapegoats for failures of the NHS, warns doctors’ chief
DOCTORS have accused Theresa May of making GPs scapegoats to divert attention from the crisis in the Health Service. In a strongly worded open letter, their union has attacked the Government for ‘ putting lives at risk’ by slashing funding.
The intervention by the British Medical Association follows a warning by the Prime Minister that GPs were partly to blame for the pressure on A&E by closing their surgeries early.
But leading GPs and a senior Tory MP hit back to insist that the problems were largely due to funding cuts. Now the BMA chairman Dr Mark Porter has gone further with the letter and a request for an immediate meeting with the Prime Minister to ‘ work out a solution’.
He wrote: ‘I have been horrified to see the position which you have taken in responding to the current crisis in the NHS in England.
‘ In playing down what is happening in hospitals up and down the country – with beds at full capacity, daily breaches in A&E and critical operations being cancelled – and in then seeking to lay the blame on general practice, your Govern- ment appears to be seeking deliberately to distract from what is really happening in the NHS.
‘Services are failing patients and their families, tying the hands of those who care for them, in the face of titanic pressures across the system.
‘The continual salami slicing, the presentation of cuts as improvements in the face of palpably deteriorating services and the scapegoating of those who work in the service have led to this situation, one in which patients’ lives and well-being are at risk. This should not be acceptable for any government.’
Leading doctors say conditions in A&E are the worst they have ever known.
Horrifying pictures have emerged of sick children sleeping on blankets on the floor and last week half of all hospitals declared a major alert as their casualty units were so overwhelmed.
Some trusts, including Leeds Teaching Hospitals, have resorted to cancelling urgent cancer operations as they have run out of beds.
The BMA already has a rocky relationship with the Government and the letter is set to worsen tensions. The union was behind a wave of highly destructive strikes by junior doctors last year which only ended after they lost support.
Other leading figures have already waded into the debate. They include Dr Helen StokesLampard, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, who warned that the Prime Minister had ‘upset lots of people’.
In an interview for ITV’s Peston on Sunday, she added that it was ‘clearly preposterous’ to keep surgeries open from 8am to 8pm, seven days a week as Mrs May has ordered.
Dr Stokes-Lampard said it was ‘old fashioned nonsense’ that GPs were overpaid and a ‘distraction from the real problem’.
Tory MP Sarah Wollaston, a former GP who heads the health select committee, also came to the defence of doctors.
She said: ‘To be suggesting that all of this problem is due to GPs not seeing people is really stretching it, it’s just not the case, it’s wrong to be scapegoating them in my view.’
Dr Mark Holland, president of the Society for Acute Medicine representing hospital specialists, said A&E units were not full of patients who could have seen a GP. ‘The patients we are seeing this winter are sick,’ he said.
‘If emergency departments are full of sick people the problem is not due to inadequate primary care. The problem is that we do not have enough beds to accommodate patients.’ A Government spokesman responded: ‘We know the NHS is under increased pressure at the moment and staff and hospitals are working hard to cope with the extra demands winter brings.
‘GPs play a vital role in reducing pressure on A&Es which is why we want to see extended surgery opening times, backed by an extra £528million per year in funding by 2020/21.’
Last week a report by the National Audit Office exposed how thousands of practices were routinely shutting for three-hour lunch breaks or taking one afternoon off a week.