General Practice “Collective Action”

You may have seen reports in the press about GPs taking “Collective Action”. This is a national protest about the lack of funding in General Practice and to save GP services from going further into decline.

Everyone will be aware of the pressures in General Practice – with appointments getting harder and harder to get year on year. This was happening before the pandemic. In some areas GP services have nearly collapsed with patients being directed to walk-in centres, 111 or A&E from early in the morning.

Hospital consultant numbers have doubled in the last 20 years whilst GP whole-time equivalents are now decreasing nationally. In addition, GP practice funding has not kept pace with basic costs or staff employment.

At the Corbett Medical Practice, we work extremely hard to maintain staffing levels and standards across all our medical, nursing and allied health professional teams. We have very able, hardworking admin staff and care navigators in reception. Despite this we are not immune from the general pressures and maintaining service levels has become an increasing challenge.

We give much more to the NHS in terms of goodwill over and above what we are contracted to do. We feel we have been taken for granted by the NHS leadership and so we will be considering joining the collective action in terms of elements such as:

• Reducing use of consultant “Advice and Guidance” – a pandemic measure that reduces hospital waiting times which requires GPs to do more of the hospital work.

• We are not currently changing our appointment processes but in the future, we may consider a limit to the total number of appointments per GP per day to what is a safe level (the BMA and international consensus suggests 25). Despite being fully staffed with GPs, we currently provide between 34 and 41 appointments per GP per day – and in addition we never turn away any extra patients over this number when clinically critically urgent. Even if we took this action, we would still see any critically urgent cases every day.

We all work extremely hard to maintain a very high level of patient care and anything we do; we will do our utmost to ensure that there is only a minimal effect on patient care.

Partners : Dr M Pickworth, Dr S De Vos, Dr K Sivakumar, Dr A Cooper, Dr A McNamara, Dr M Caley