President of Royal College of GP warns ‘Real threat’ general practice could end up like DENTISTRY –

The country’s leading family physician has warned that family doctors’ practices face the “real threat” of termination as dentists.

Professor Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs, says the job of general practitioners is “getting more difficult”.

Increasing pressures, fueled by a staff crisis, could push them out of healthcare and into private work.

He said this risks making access to the remaining NHS GP practices “such as dentistry” “very difficult” and a “significant” cash injection is needed to stop this.

Professor Marshall also warned that the general practice could become “the worst thing in the US healthcare system”, with only payers having access to “good care.”

It comes in the midst of a great debate about opening hours, family doctors’ terms and conditions, and the “zip code lottery” for making appointments.

Patients have complained for years of difficulties in accessing their primary care physician, and in-person appointments have failed to return to pre-pandemic levels.

But family doctors warn that the workload / workforce imbalance in the industry is putting GPs out of the profession, who earn an average of £100,000 a year.

According to the latest development, doctors will vote at a conference next month whether to reduce their central working hours by two and a half hours.

The GP Worklife survey found that by 2021, more than half of primary care physicians were working six sessions per week or less, with each session lasting four hours and 10 minutes. About one-fifth of the workforce saw patients in four or fewer sessions, 12.4% worked in five sessions and 27.9% worked in six sessions.

The graph shows the number of doctor’s appointments per day in January. Since 2019, GPs have been called to work in the evenings and on weekends. However, only 22,000 patients were seen on average on Saturday in January, compared to around 1.2 million patients on weekdays.

NHS Digital data released today shows that only 60% of appointments in January are made in person, up from 61% in December.

Speaking at GP’s trade magazine’s wrist GP conference in London yesterday, Professor Marshall said: “Some practices have been really challenged” [and] overthrown.

†[But] I do not think that the general practitioner model will disappear completely, nor do I think that it will be broken.

“But I think if we continue under the pressure we have now, GP practice will become more and more difficult work and an increasingly difficult job to do well.”

“The risk is that we have become the worst healthcare system in the United States, where if you can pay to get good care, great, and if you can’t, you have a very inadequate system for picking parts. .

Or like dentistry in this country where an increasing number of dentists have moved to the private sector in the last 15 years. There is an NHS system, but it is very difficult to access.

“I don’t think we want to see this in general practice, and it looks like a very important and very real threat that we have to face.”

The time comes next month when family doctors will vote on whether to reduce their core hours of work by two and a half hours a day.

Surgery is currently routinely performed between 08:00 and 18:30.

However, the Avon Local Medical Committee (LMC) will present a proposal at a conference in the presence of hundreds of GPs in York, May 10-11, demanding that doctors’ working hours be reduced from 9:00 to 17:00.

Doctors say the move will improve the well-being of primary care doctors, meaning they can provide better and safer service and are less likely to stop.

If the motion is passed, practices will want to pressure NHS England to make the changes.

But patient groups reacted to the move. Dennis Reed, director of Silver Voices, an action group over the 60s, called the proposal “unacceptable”.

“Every day we hear of patients who have trouble seeing their GP or are only able to get an appointment for a few weeks.

“Further reduction of access in this way will lead to more patients who are already overloaded going to the emergency room or depriving people of the care they need.

“Working families appreciate early opening times and later closing times, and reducing this will cause distress or lead to failure.”

Dr. Richard Vautrey, former chair of the board of general practitioners at the British Medical Association, said shorter working hours could encourage more doctors to stay in the profession.

But he admitted there is “no solution to their current problems” because it would inevitably mean “more patients with the care they need.”

“What we really need is more primary care physicians to improve patient access,” added Dr Vautrey.

Meanwhile, a separate motion from the Cambridgeshire and Cleveland LMCs to be heard at next month’s conference calls for plans to introduce “safe workload limits” for general practices to protect staff and patients.

Another motion states that the public emerged from the pandemic with “extra and unrealistic expectations from general practice.”

The resolution, which was tabled by Ayrshire and Arran LMC, calls for an education campaign for patients to “use properly” self-care and turn to pharmacy, optometry and dental services.

Participating doctors will also vote on whether patients who abuse GP practices should be removed from their lists and whether all hospital doctors should work in GP practices as part of their training.

Dr. Rachel Ward of the Rebuild General Practice campaign said: “The workload of GPs is unmanageable and dangerous.

“As a physician entering GP practice to care for patients, I am shocked that family doctors schedule so many more appointments per day than is currently considered the safe limit.

“GPs and patients want the same thing – to give and receive the best care – and for that we need more doctors so we have more time for treatment.”