GPs call on patient assistance in bid to reverse funding cuts

GPs claim funding cuts have left a lot of services struggling to survive. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA

GPs are mounting a challenging-hitting poster campaign and calling on sufferers to back demands for the government to reverse swingeing funding cuts for common practice, which they say have left solutions struggling to survive.

The poster – exhibiting lengthy queues of folks outside a GP practice in an echo of the Tories’ “Labour Is not Working” poster during the 1979 election – are being sent to every Uk surgical treatment for medical doctors to place up in waiting rooms. Hundreds of 1000′s of sufferers will be asked to sign a petition calling for the government to conserve standard practice.

The campaign is currently being driven by the National Association for Patient Participation and the Royal College of Standard Practitioners (RCGP), which warns that rising workloads and cuts to funding imply the risk to patient care has “never been better”. The RCGP says that more than the previous decade patient consultations have soared to an all-time substantial even though funding for basic practice has dropped to a historic lower.

Much more than 90% of NHS patient contacts take location in basic practice and GP teams have 40m far more appointments a 12 months than they did 5 years ago, the RCGP said, yet funding has plummeted to 8.39% of the complete NHS spending budget. It explained 34m requests for consultations with a family physician would not be met this 12 months due to the fact of developing demand and declining resources, according to its analysis of the independent GP Patient survey.

Dr Maureen Baker, chairwoman of the RCGP, warned that sufferers had been waiting longer for appointments, which would lead to some going to hospital for treatment method or not in search of support at all.

She mentioned: “General practice across the Uk is on the edge, with GP workloads ballooning, funding for basic practice plummeting and up to one hundred practices at chance of closure in the next 12 months. The overpowering bulk of GPs – some of whom carry out up to 60 patient consultations a day – are now so active that they fear they may possibly miss some thing serious in 1 of their patients.

“The danger to protected patient care has in no way been greater – and it is because GPs are so concerned about the common of care they can supply that we hope patients across the country will signal our petition calling on the 4 governments of the Uk to give standard practice the investment it desperately wants.”

GPs call on patient assistance in bid to reverse funding cuts