‘Recruiting and retaining more GPs is vital if we are to bring back the family doctor’ says College Chair

Kamila Hawthorne, Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, has spoken to the Telegraph about taking the NHS ‘back to basics’.

One of the Health Secretary’s three “strategic shifts” is to deliver more care out of hospitals in the community. This makes sense. Care is more cost-effective in the community – it’s also where most patients want to be treated.

Recruiting and retaining more GPs in the workforce must be a vital component of the forthcoming 10-year health plan, if the Health Secretary’s plan to shift more care into the community and ‘bring back the family doctor’ is to be realised. This in itself is ‘back to basics’: delivering safe, timely and holistic care close to home, identifying health issues and intervening appropriately before they get more serious.

It’s what GPs are trained to do and it’s what we want to do; but we must be appropriately resourced, and have enough GPs to do it.

When properly staffed and resourced, a robust general practice service can alleviate pressures across the health service. GPs and their teams make the vast majority of patient contacts – last year alone, we delivered 367 million appointments (20 million more than in 2023), all with a shrinking portion of the NHS budget and a workforce that has not risen in step with demand.

Despite these efforts and pressures, we still hear too many patients reporting struggling to access GP care and services when they need them. GP workload is growing both in volume and complexity but the GP workforce is not growing fast enough to keep up – and our patients are bearing the brunt.

Ultimately, we won’t be able to improve our patients’ access to appointments if we don’t have the numbers of GPs we need. The Health Secretary has committed to reviewing the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan. This is a necessity for increasing GP numbers, through expanding training places and giving more focus on keeping more GPs at all career stages in the workforce longer.

Another basic necessity for GPs and our teams to ensure patients receive the care they need is decent infrastructure: the buildings we work in, and the equipment and IT systems we use.

Cramped and crumbling buildings and outdated IT systems not only affect our patients’ experiences of receiving care, but our ability to deliver more appointments and train more GPs and medical students. So when we talk about going “back to basics” infrastructure issues must also be addressed.

Across the board, we need to see a guarantee that general practice will see a higher proportion of the NHS budget, and that this is tracked locally and nationally, so we can guarantee our patients the treatment they need and GPs want to be able to deliver.

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.