Professor Kamila Hawthorne
Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, General Practitioner in South Wales
Lord Darzi’s landmark NHS review for the new Government in September highlighted troubling issues. For GPs and frontline teams, though shocking, these findings were all too familiar.
Today, over 1 million patients will be seen by their local GP practice, and this figure has been rising for years. Our College has long warned that general practice is under immense pressure from years of under-investment and poor workforce planning; and it is our patients — particularly the most vulnerable — suffering the consequences.
Current primary care situation
Lord Darzi acknowledged that primary care is consistently delivering more care but receiving a shrinking proportion of the NHS budget. Our workload has grown, both in terms of complexity and volume, and we are delivering millions more appointments, all with fewer qualified full-time equivalent GPs than five years ago.
Our latest figures show that each GP is now responsible for an average of 2,300 patients. General practice can’t keep doing more with less. Patients are struggling to get appointments, and our colleagues are leaving the profession in droves because they are burnt out and exhausted.
Primary care is consistently delivering
more care but receiving a shrinking
proportion of the NHS budget.
Workforce needed to reach government targets
The new Government has set out clear targets for improving the NHS. One commitment is to move more care out of hospitals and into the community. Patients want to be treated closer to home, where care is more cost-effective, more convenient for patients and outcomes are better — but we need the workforce to deliver this. We need to recruit thousands more GPs to deliver more care to our patients.
Alongside this, the Government must do everything possible to retain our valued and experienced GPs. We need national retention schemes to support them at every career stage. Our surveys show that over 40% of GPs said they were planning to leave general practice within five years.
Supporting general practice for NHS resilience
The Government announced it will publish a 10-year plan for the NHS in 2025 — this is a real opportunity to turn things around. GPs are innovators, and we are used to adapting the way we work to meet the changing needs of our patients.
General practice will need to play a vital role to ensure we have a modern, efficient and safe health service that can deliver the care patients need well into the future. Investment in general practice is an investment in the entire NHS. However, we need the right support to make it happen.
