Nearly 10,000 GPs urge Health Secretary to tackle the GP workforce 'crisis'

Publication date: 23 July 2024

Nearly 10,000 GPs have signed an open letter to the new Health Secretary, Wes Streeting MP, calling for a review of the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan in order to address the current GP workforce crisis. This comes after National Audit Office analysis revealed a major disparity between projected numbers of qualified hospital consultants and GPs over the next decade.

Chair of Council, Professor Kamila Hawthorne, will deliver the letter to the Department of Health and Social Care later today (Tuesday 23 July), and it has been covered in The Guardian.

The full text of the letter reads:

Dear Secretary of State,

We 9,765 GPs, GP trainees and retired GPs across England are writing to ask you to help us improve care for the tens of millions of patients we serve.

Last year, general practice delivered 356 million appointments, 14% more than in 2019. However, since 2019, the number of fully qualified, full-time equivalent GPs has fallen by 2%. This has contributed to dangerously high workloads, with 76% of GPs saying their workload is impacting patient safety. We cannot allow this situation to continue.

As you have already acknowledged, it is absurd that some GPs are now struggling to find work when patients are crying out to see their GP. Successive governments’ underfunding of general practice and lack of workforce planning means there simply is not sufficient funding to enable practices to recruit the GPs they need, and this is jeopardising the standard of care patients receive.

The current NHS Long Term Workforce Plan only aims to increase the number of fully qualified GPs by 4% by 2037, compared to a 49% growth in hospital consultants. This would leave an already chronically understaffed general practice woefully unprepared to meet the growing needs of patients. This would fly in the face of your manifesto commitment to shift resources to primary care and community services to focus on prevention and enable patients to receive the care they need, closer to home.

We therefore ask you to urgently review the NHS's Long Term Workforce Plan to better reflect your manifesto commitments. We need a comprehensive plan to provide sufficient capacity to train more GPs, do much more to retain the GPs we have, and ensure practices have the infrastructure and resources to employ enough GPs and their teams to deliver safe, timely and appropriate care.

General practice has been ignored for too long, and our patients are paying the price – and as the front door to the NHS, this has serious repercussions for the rest of the NHS. A well-funded general practice service, staffed with enough GPs, will alleviate pressures across the NHS. I hope you will recognise this and tackle the GP workforce crisis as a priority in your new role.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Kamila Hawthorne
Chair of Council
Royal College of General Practitioners, alongside 9765 GPs, trainees and retired GPs across England

Commenting on the letter, Professor Kamila Hawthorne said: "Too many patients are struggling to see their GP when they need to because we simply don’t have enough GPs for the growing number of patients who need our care. We desperately need many thousands more of us delivering patient care on the front line of the NHS. This is why we’re so concerned about current projections within the NHS Long Term Workforce plan, which according to analysis by the National Audit Office show a paltry rise in the number of full-time, fully-qualified GPs over the next 10-12 years, especially when compared to hospital doctors.

“We absolutely need more doctors across the board, but the new government has made clear its ambitions to move more care out of hospitals and into the community. This makes sense as general practice delivers cost effective care, close to home where patients want to be treated. But resources – including staff – must follow, so it makes no sense for numbers of qualified GPs to stagnate, whilst numbers of hospital consultants rise significantly.

“What we think is missing in the LTWP is a focus on retention – keeping the experienced, highly-skilled GPs we have in the profession longer, delivering the patient care they are trained to and want to deliver. It does include bold ambitions to train more GPs but not on keeping them, and we know from our outreach with members that thousands of GPs are considering leaving the profession earlier than planned – often citing stress and burnout as reasons for this - and that this is happening at all career stages, not just those approaching retirement age.

“This is why we’ve written to the Secretary of State urging him to review the LTWP and almost 10,000 of our members have signed our letter, showing significant strength of feeling amongst the GP profession.

“General practice is the bedrock of the NHS – it is highly-valued by patients and when it is properly resourced it alleviates pressures across the health service - but it has been neglected for decades. Mr Streeting has acknowledged the importance of general practice and pledged to shift more resources into primary care – but if we are going to turn things around and fix the front door of the NHS, we will need many thousands more GPs.”

Further information

RCGP press office: 0203 188 7659
press@rcgp.org.uk

Notes to editors

The Royal College of General Practitioners is a network of more than 54,000 family doctors working to improve care for patients. We work to encourage and maintain the highest standards of general medical practice and act as the voice of GPs on education, training, research and clinical standards.