Politicians alienating GPs with 'relentless' attacks, senior doctor claims
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Version 0 of 1. Politicians are alienating GPs with "relentless attacks" and use of "political gimmickry" to tackle the unsustainable pressures facing family doctors, a key leader of the profession warns on Thursday. In a critique of the coalition and Labour opposition, Dr Chaand Nagpaul will accuse them of belittling GPs by bemoaning the difficulty patients have getting appointments and the lack of extended opening times. Politicians' failure to grasp the extent of the growing workloads in general practice is contributing to the potential "destruction" of the service, according to Nagpaul, the chair of the British Medical Association's GPs committee. Speaking to the BMA's annual GPs conference in Harrogate, Nagpaul will blame politicians' "attacks which are heavy on spite and light on evidence" for contributing to a fall in the number of young doctors who are choosing to become GPs. "These doctors are not shunning the discipline of general practice, but the intolerable pressure that GPs are subject to, together with relentless attacks that devalue what we do, and which has butchered the joy and ability of GPs to properly care for our patients," he will say. He will castigate the coalition for giving hospital A&E units an extra £500m to help them cope with last and next winter, but only finding £50m for the prime minister's "challenge fund" to enable more surgeries to open from 8am to 8pm every day – a key promise David Cameron made last year at the Conservatives' annual conference. "So while £500m was given to ease the pressures in A&E, it's a kick in the teeth for general practice to receive £50m not to ease any crisis or pressure, but actually to provide even more over seven days a week," Nagpaul will tell GPs. While Nagpaul does not say how much general practice needs to keep pace with the growing demand for appointments, the Royal College of GPs believes it needs to receive at least £2bn more of the NHS budget by 2017. GP services' share of NHS funding has been shrinking in recent years at the same time as hospitals have been receiving more, and now stands at less than 9%, although 90% of patient contacts are with GPs. Waits of at least a week to see a GP are increasingly common, and a poll of GPs this week found that some were expecting patients to face delays of up to two weeks by this time next year. Nagpaul, a GP in north-west London, will also brand as unrealistic Ed Miliband's high-profile pledge last week that under Labour patients would be guaranteed a GP appointment within 48 hours. "And the opposition also appears blind to current pressures, and failing to learn from the past, in resurrecting a discredited 48-hour access target, which will force GPs into offering perverse appointment systems that distort clinical priorities. Patients deserve better than this political gimmickry," he will say in a sideswipe at both leaders' rival initiatives on GP care. Both Labour and the Department of Health reject Nagpaul's claims. A DH spokesman said: "We value the work GPs do, and know they're under pressure, which is why we're cutting GP targets by more than a third to free up more time with patients, increasing trainees so that GP numbers continue to grow faster than the population and have committed to train 10,000 more primary and community health and care staff by 2020." A Labour spokesman said only Labour was serious about investing in GP surgeries. "We have pledged £100m to help patients get appointments more quickly. Too many are waiting a week under this government," he said. The BMA gathering will hold a potentially divisive debate on Thursday about the possibility of introducing charges for patients to see a GP. The motion states that "it is no longer viable for general practice to provide all patients with all NHS services free at the point of delivery", as the NHS has done since its inception, and calls on the doctors' union to "consider alternative funding mechanisms for general practice [and] explore national charging for general practice services with the UK governments". Meanwhile, new research out on Thursday shows that only 15% of patients who turn up at A&E could have been seen and treated by a GP. That is far less than the 40% figure often cited, including by NHS England and some A&E doctors, as the proportion of unnecessary or avoidable attendances at A&E. However, that still equates to about 2.1 million people seeking A&E care when they could have gone elsewhere, according to the College of Emergency Medicine, which represents A&E doctors and commissioned the study. Meanwhile it has emerged that up to 300,000 patients, many of them elderly, have been discharged from hospital in the middle of the night, two years after NHS bosses vowed to stop the practice. An investigation by the Times has revealed that patients are still being woken up and sent home, in a bid to relieve pressure on wards. Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association said: "It is simply unacceptable that patients are being discharged from hospital late at night." |