Patients first: Why general practice is broken & how we can fix it (BMA, October 2024)

Summary

 Despite its extremely low funding, Professor Lord Ara Darzi’s September 2024 report on the productivity of the NHS across England singled out general practice for its unprecedentedly high activity.

The ‘front door’ to the NHS for an average of nearly 1.5 million appointments every day, yet collapsing from 15 years of funding erosion, GP practices across England currently only receive 5.5p out of every pound spent on the NHS for the core (essential) services they are contracted to deliver. The new Labour Government has begun to invest, but the scale of the challenge is clear: recent uplifts have only contributed a single additional penny per patient per day.

Around 2,000 independent GP practices have been lost since 2010 – that’s one in five local surgeries. That’s a problem for all of us as patients and the NHS in general.

This paper from the BMA is a vision and a toolkit for how to deliver what patients want from the NHS.

Content

Fixing the NHS must start with bringing back the family doctor. Patients want the Government to fix the broken general practice it has inherited and deliver them a safe and stable local GP surgery and the family doctor they know and trust.

We need:

• more GPs to meet the needs of our patients
• more GP appointments to stop the 8am rush
• more GP Practice Nurses – familiar faces known and trusted by the patients who need them most
• more GP Practice Nurse appointments delivering local joined-up care closer to home in the community
• better continuity of care – by seeing the same clinician, patients can build trust in who delivers their care and receive better customer service.