Jon Trickett MP: Not enough GPs and staff to cope

Jon Trickett writes: I started at 8am and the line was constantly engaged until 9.20am. By then, all the same-day appointments had gone. I was at least given a prescription, but it took four days to be ready.

I absolutely don’t blame the reception staff or the doctors. I was treated politely and with respect on the phone and whenever I go into the surgery I am greeted with a lovely smile and a caring attitude.

The fact is that doctors and their staff are under huge pressure – there simply aren’t enough of them.

Yet, instead of fulfilling their manifesto pledges to recruit thousands more GPs, the Tories’ “solution” to ending the 8am scramble for appointments is new telephone technology.

Better phone lines won’t create more staff to answer them or more GPs and nurses to see patients.

At best they will put you into a queue and tell you where you are in it as you hang on the line. It’s incoherent idiocy.

In their 13 years of power, this government has made our health and education sectors deeply undesirable places to work.

It’s little wonder there’s a GP recruitment crisis when three-quarters of GPs, as one survey found, report that their workload is unmanageable or unsustainable.

In 2015, the Tory manifesto pledged to recruit 5,000 more GPs by 2020. At the 2019 general election, the pledge was 6,000. Yet there are 2,000 fewer full time, fully trained GPs today than in 2015.

In some parts of the country, there are around half the number of GPs since before the pandemic trying to meet up to a 40 per cent higher demand. It’s their biggest workload in decades and they are burnt out.

The rate of GP practices closing is also up, linked to reduced funding per patient and more patients per GP. Two surgeries in the UK close every week, distributing patients between other practices, only exacerbating the staffing and funding crisis.

Ministers have also hit on giving pharmacists an expanded role.

Over 160 pharmacies in England have closed over the last two years.

A local pharmacist in Fitzwilliam, wrote to me recently about the difficulties his team are facing. Even before the pandemic, pharmacies were experiencing severe cash flow problems due to real-term government cuts in NHS pharmacy funding and rising costs.

Covid and the cost-of-living crisis have made things much worse.

As he explained to me, most independent community pharmacies are small to medium-sized family businesses, employing local people and are especially vulnerable.

His team are now reviewing their opening hours and services they have traditionally delivered without remuneration from the NHS.

How they take on more of the work of GPs in these circumstances is beyond me.

The crushing lack of GPs is a problem that cannot be solved by a bit of new tech and shifting the burden elsewhere. Our NHS needs proper funding. There is no alternative.