NHS crisis hits GPs

As the UK’s top GP warned that GP services are the latest part of the NHS to reach crisis point, concerns are growing that the Conservative Government is losing its grip on this flagship public service.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt spent months concentrating on the bewildering changes to junior hospital doctors’ contracts, but has failed to deal with increasing hospital waiting lists for routine procedures or the winter crisis in A&E. Nor has he come up with a coherent and cost effective way of dealing with care for the elderly, currently split between local Councils and the NHS (depending on individual medical needs).

While the Government dithers, private sector health companies are busy raking in the cash from PFI deals done in the Blair and Brown years and which are now being paid for. Only a bit of creative accounting has stopped the NHS going bankrupt.

Now the Chair of the Royal College of GPs’ Council, Dr Helen Stokes-Lampard, has chosen the quiet news period between Christmas and New Year to warn that GP services are struggling to manage too. She explained that patients are already waiting two to three weeks for a non-urgent appointment – and the waiting time is likely to increase as GPs deal with an increased number of urgent appointments due to the seasonal spike in illness. She is worried that waiting three to four weeks for a GP appointment may see non-urgent conditions becoming serious, or a delay in the diagnosis of serious disease – with a knock-on delay in treatment being started.

Dr Stokes-Lampard explained that as GPs take more time over seasonal issues, they will have less time to help manage chronic conditions such as high blood pressure. GPs have been helping patients manage these conditions for years, saving patients from heart attacks and strokes that these underlying conditions can bring on. If this careful work slows, there will be an increase in the more serious and sometimes fatal conditions that were being kept at bay. She also warned that if GP services break down, hospitals would be quickly overwhelmed by the increased demand for their services.

In response to these concerns, Labour’s Shadow Health Minister, Julie Cooper, said that the state of GP services is “extremely worrying” and at crisis point.  NHS England said that the Government had promised to allocate extra money to the NHS by 2020. The Government has yet to comment.

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