I'm a Barnsley GP - Labour needs to fix our broken general practice system: Dr Clare Bannon

We’re there for the baby's first check-up all the way through to helping families plan end of life care for their loved ones.  

It’s a real privilege being a GP and a vocation I always knew I wanted to follow.

I decided to study medicine when I was 14 and early in my medical career knew that general practice was something I would enjoy.

I loved the idea of making a real difference throughout patients’ lives.

But the reason so many of us chose general practice - to offer patient-centred care in the heart of our communities - has been robbed from us.

The system has been broken by more than a decade of underinvestment and a failure to properly resource our services.  

We’ve got a growing and ageing population, which means demand is going up, but we don’t have enough GPs to meet it. Since 2015, we’ve lost the equivalent of more than 1,700 full-time, fully qualified GPs.  

On top of that, the cost of keeping our doors open, buildings in good repair, and hiring staff has risen, but without equivalent funding to match. This means it’s getting harder for practices to pay for the things they need.

For example, some can’t afford to hire the GPs we do have and many are now short of or out of work. 

To make matters worse, the £1.4bn per year from which the Government provides staff for primary care, specifically excludes GPs and practice nurses, forcing us instead to hire other staff which our communities may not have as much need for.

Our surgery buildings are crumbling, our IT systems often freeze mid-consultation and we as GPs are burdened with so much red tape that significant chunks of our 12 hour working days are taken up with box-ticking, supervision and paperwork rather than seeing our patients – which frustrates both us and them. 

We are doing the best we can, and we are working around the clock to keep up.

In May, GP practices delivered an average of 1.45 million appointments per working day in England, but it’s still not enough. We and our staff are burning out, and our patients, frustrated that they are unable to see us when they need to, are suffering as a result.    

The phones start ringing at eight o’clock every morning and don’t stop all day.

We usually start seeing patients at half past, but it’s hard to stick to time. Needing to admit a patient can take up to 30 minutes and you end up running late. We try to eat lunch as a team, but all too often have to grab something so we can keep on top of admin.

GPs are tired of not being able to be the GPs they trained to be. It’s becoming impossible to do our jobs in a system that’s driven by targets set by people who aren’t GPs instead of focusing on the needs of the patient in front of us.  

What we want is exactly the same as our patients: for them to be able to see their family doctor, quickly and easily, in a practice that’s safe, well-staffed, and local to them. This also helps to keep more people out of hospital. 

The new Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, recently committed to diverting billions of pounds from hospitals into general practice, and while his ambition should be applauded, we can’t rely on depriving other parts of the NHS to boost primary care.

Mr Streeting needs to work out how and when he’s going to increase our guaranteed share of the NHS budget – which is currently just six per cent - to at least 15 per cent, which is what we need to deliver the services our patients deserve.

These funding requirements are included in the British Medical Association’s vision for the future of general practice.

We hope the new Government will work with us to implement it, and understand why it’s so important to give each sector of the NHS the funding it requires, in full, rather than taking from one to give to another.

Labour must do something about the crisis in general practice, and GPs are waiting with bated breath to see what ministers have to offer when it comes to repairing the years of damage done to our profession.

This is the moment to turn the page and give general practice the resources it desperately needs to survive.

General practice has been broken. The new Government must fix it.

Dr Clare Bannon is the GPC England policy lead at the BMA.