Analysis of data on GP services by the Labour Party has revealed a growing crisis of accessibility, as millions of patients across the country have worse access to their doctor than they did five years ago.
A major doctors’ group has also stated that Labour’s warning echoes concerns previously raised that cuts to funding and major GP recruitment difficulties have led to accessibility for services being reduced by patients.
Labour looked in detail at findings in the GP Patient Survey released earlier this year by NHS England, which found that 28% of patients reported finding it it ‘not very easy’ or ‘not at all easy’ to get a GP appointment over the phone. The figure is a rise from 2012, when the figure stood at 19%.
Patients also said that their local surgery was not open at convenient times, as 71% of respondents said that their practice should be open on Saturday.
The party explained that the analysis was evidence of the detrimental effect of underfunding in primary care services.
“This research exemplifies just how hard it is becoming to see a GP in Tory Britain, with patients’ overall experience of their GP services getting drastically worse,” said shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth
“Overworked and under-funded GPs are struggling to cope with rising needs from patients. Across the country GPs and practice staff are working to keep the service running in the face of astonishing neglect from Theresa May and her ministers.
“The British public deserves better. Labour would give GPs the resources and support they need to provide better and more accessible services for patients.”
Chair of the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard added that today’s announcement from Labour largely repeated the same calls that doctors have been saying for some time now.
“Our own analysis of the GP Patient Survey found that patients will be unable to make an appointment with a GP or practice nurse on 100m occasions by 2022 if trends continue,” she commented.
“This is despite GPs and our teams making more patient consultations a year that ever before - currently over 370m - to meet escalating patient demand. This is a clear risk to patient safety – and must be addressed as a matter of urgency.”
The RCGP chair added that patients can always access urgent GP care when they needed to through routine services and the GP out of hours service.
“It certainly makes no sense to start offering extra services where there is little patient demand,” she continued. “We know that in many cases, practices have already had to actually stop offering extended opening hours because of a lack of patient demand for them.
“With such scarce resources for our profession and a huge shortage of GPs at the moment, the government's focus must be on delivering more funding to offer our existing five-day service – and sufficient GPs and practice team members to deliver it.”
A spokesperson for the DH said that GPs were the “bedrock” of the health service, and that they had been backed with an extra £2.4bn of funding and 5,000 more GPs by 2020.
“Patients deserve to be able to get the right care at the right time for them and 17 million people are already able to make a routine appointment with a GP at evenings and weekends,” they stated.
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