Building Sustainable GP services

Building Sustainable GP services: parliamentary briefing

The Nuffield Trust has written a Briefing (Parliamentary briefing: building sustainable GP services) for busy MPs ahead of the election, slices and dices some interesting figures.

Let’s look at patient satisfaction first. Patients report high levels of satisfaction with the way they are treated in appointments (with 83% saying they were treated with care and concern). Among the wider public, at large, GPs command a 71% satisfaction rating (British Social Attitudes survey) higher than any branch of NHS hospital care. Yet this figure has fallen over recent years, and is now the lowest on record.

What of earnings? You may not be surprised to learn that GPs saw a fall in their average income before tax between 2011/12 and 2012/13 (by 2.4%) albeit in a climate of real-terms wage decreases in every part of the economy.  That said, GPs who are Partners in practices are the best paid among OECD countries. However, the earnings of GPs who work for others in Britain do not compare so favourably to their international equivalents.

Following on from their recent policy document – Is general practice in crisis? – this Briefing pulls out headlines on staffing and funding, Quality of care and waiting times including impact on A&E and the future for general practice.  It ends by advocating both increased funding and the development of larger scale general practices which work closely with the wider NHS, managing patients better and meeting more complex needs. The pitch is that “Pooling resources and increasing scale improves GPs’ ability to invest in staff and infrastructure, build links with the wider health system and take on new and extended clinical and managerial roles.”

You may want to take a closer look, and will certainly source a statistic to trip off the tongue here and there.

Sue Lacey Bryant
Workforce Development Tutor

Health Education Thames Valley – Developing people for health and healthcare

 

 

Published: 9 March 2015