Funding for general practice must increase to ease mounting pressure on GPs and the wider NHS, says DAUK’s GP co-lead.
Dr Steve Taylor was speaking on national radio about a survey by Pulse, which found that an estimated quarter of GP referrals to secondary care are returned as unsolicited Advice and Guidance.
He told listeners of Times Radio that the additional workload was putting further pressure on an already overstretched general practice.
Dr Taylor said GPs were paid 20% less in real terms than 10 years ago as he called on the Government to invest in general practice to help ease pressure across the NHS and improve access for patients.
Underemployed GPs
He said there were around 3,000 underemployed GPs who could work more hours if practices had the resources to employ them.
“If the money was available today, we could have 10% more appointments tomorrow,” he said.
Dr Taylor said that hospital waiting lists had increased significantly since 2010, when around 2 million people were waiting for hospital treatment compared with approximately 7 million today.
“Over that period we’ve seen 20% more work being done in general practice,” he said. “Last month a record 35 million appointments took place in general practice, half of those with GPs. Compare that with the 2 million who attended A&E.
“GPs are really frustrated. We just want to see more funding in primary care, to employ the unemployed and underemployed GPs and get the whole thing working better again.”
Advice and Guidance
Advice and Guidance was introduced to help GPs seek specialist input while patients waited for hospital care, or before making a referral.
However, Dr Taylor said it had increasingly resulted in hospitals returning referrals to GPs with requests for further work to be carried out in primary care.
He said: “If I’m dealing with all the referral bounce backs, and I’m also dealing with the people that are waiting for hospital treatments, then there are going to be issues for me providing appointments for today.”
Listen to the interview with Dr Taylor on the DAUK Instagram.
DAUK committee members are all volunteers and campaign on issues facing frontline doctors in their own time. Please support our work by joining DAUK or donating to our GoFundMe.