The Doctors’ Association UK (DAUK) has criticised the minister of state for care for urging patients to ‘take action’ against GP practices that do not meet new contractual requirements for online access.
Under the new rules, GP practices must keep online systems open for routine patient requests between 8am and 6.30pm.
The systems must stay open regardless of workload or staffing levels.
Care minister
In a now-deleted post on X, Stephen Kinnock MP encouraged patients to take action against practices not meeting these obligations.
Dr Steve Taylor, DAUK GP co-lead, responded in an interview with Pulse.
He said: “Stephen Kinnock has been told repeatedly that online access without safeguards for patients and increased GP capacity is a problem.”
Dr Taylor said added: “GPs are not being luddites or trying to obstruct innovation, they have repeatedly increased capacity, but there are limits.
Raising expectations
‘Raising expectations without increasing capacity is a folly, worse it’s lying to patients and pretending that they are on the side of patients.
“Hopefully people will see through the soundbites. But sadly GPs will be blamed, held responsible, some will leave, others will breach their contracts.”
DAUK committee members are all volunteers and speak to the media about issues facing frontline doctors in their own time. Please support our work by joining DAUK or donating to our GoFundMe.
