'Whole person' approach needed to tackle gambling harms, warns College

Dr Adrian Hayter, Medical Director for Clinical Policy at the Royal College of GPs, said: “As GPs, we see the devastating impact that gambling-related harms have on our patients and their families, but compared with other addictions, the signs of problem gambling can be well hidden.

“The RCGP has created the Gambling Harms Hub which aims to provide practice teams with the tools they need to identify and diagnose gambling harms and make appropriate referrals for patients via an eLearning course. Once completed, practices will become ‘Gambling Harms accredited’ and will receive an educational resource pack for the wider practice team."

“We know that patients often only ask for help once gambling has already negatively impacted their lives and this NICE guidance aims to encourage people to discuss their issues around gambling with a trusted healthcare professional in a confidential space before their problems worsen.

“However, we have to acknowledge the constraints of a 10-minute appointment that is already too short to accommodate the increasingly complex needs of our patients. General practice is facing a workforce and workload crisis, as more and more patients need our care at the same time as we have a shortage of GPs to keep up with demand.

“The current gambling addiction service enables self-referral, and more community-based resources and signposting should be available at a local level through voluntary organisations as part of an integrated approach rather than a medical model of referral and gatekeeping by GPs.

“GPs are just as frustrated as patients when we don’t have enough time for the sensitive, compassionate, and holistic conversations that we are trained for and want to have. Ultimately, we need to see greater investment in primary care, including recruiting and retaining the sufficient numbers of GPs we need, if we are going to be able to provide the ‘whole person’ approach to care that we know our patients want and that is so effective.”

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.