Abolish GP surgeries as NHS gatekeeper, Streeting urges

LABOUR could abolish GP surgeries and give patients the power to refer themselves to specialists under bold plans to reform the “broken” NHS.

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said he wanted to “completely rethink what primary care looks like” to save taxpayers money.

He pledged that if his party wins power it will not just continue to “spend more and more on a system that delivers poorer outcomes” for patients.

The remarks in an interview with The

Times will set him on a collision course with doctors’ unions, especially the British Medical Association.

Mr Streeting said the way GP surgeries are funded via contracts was “a murky, opaque business” and he will look at tearing up the whole system.

“As someone who wants to be a custodian of the public finances as health secretary, that would not be a tolerable situation,” he said.

Family doctors would be based with nurses and specialists, like physiotherapists in local “health centres”, which would offer a greater range of care.

Mr Streeting also signalled that he would expand the services pharmacies provide, so they can “be doing more vaccination or more prescribing”.

He said that opposition to such plans among doctors was “because they’re thinking about their own income and their own activity”. The MP for Ilford North said that GPS should no longer be “the sole gatekeeper” to the NHS and patients should be given greater choice about how they access the service.

“Sometimes it’s pretty obvious that you don’t need to see the doctor. I think there are some services where you ought to be able to self-refer,” he said.

He acknowledged that record waiting lists and horror stories from hospitals meant that the public has lost confidence in the health service.

“There is a genuine fear in the country at the moment about what will happen if you need the NHS,” he said. “For the first time in the history of the NHS, people no longer feel confident that emergency care will be there for them.”

But he insisted that the answer was not simply to pour more money into a failing system and that “the NHS is so broken, we do have to think radically”.

“There have always been people within the system who oppose fundamental change which, decades later, is widely accepted,” he said.

“I recognise it will be a big change. I want to listen to the profession and take people with us but, most importantly, I want to get this right for patients.”

Mr Streeting also suggested he would sanction a 10 per cent pay rise for nurses in England, as a “more reasonable figure” than the 19 per cent demanded.

He said Labour would sit down with the Royal College of Nursing to discuss wages and “to see off this dispute”.