TODAY, GPs and their supporters will be marching through Tower Hamlets to demand proper funding of GP surgeries, which are threatened with closure due to cuts.
It is estimated that 22 GP practices in East London could be bankrupted due to the loss of Minimum Practice Income Guarantee (MPIG) funds and 98 practices nationally.
Other funding streams are being withdrawn. The new cuts to funding are estimated to be £250m overall. At a packed meeting on 6th May, in Mile End Hospital, 80 GPs and supporters resolved to fight the cuts and organise action.
Warnings were given that if current GP practices are allowed to close, NHS England would use the opportunity to bring in for-profit private providers instead.
The Jubilee Street Practice, which cares for 11,000 patients and has very high standards, lost £78,000 of funding last year, and faces almost a million pounds withdrawal of MPIG over seven years.
Dr Naomi Beer told the London Regional Assembly meeting of the BMA last week that these cuts were causing ‘systematic destruction’ and urged everyone to ‘spread the word and get the information to the whole population’, to ‘reverse these appalling changes’.
These imminent bankruptcies of GP practices, are particularly affecting inner city areas of high deprivation, and rural practices.
Patient visits to the GP have increased by 40 million in the last five years, to 340 million, yet funding has remained static, and dropped as a proportion of total NHS spend to 8%.
The GP workload has dramatically increased with many GPs working more than 10 hours a day. GPs at their conference condemned having to see up to 60 patients a day with only 10 minutes for consultation. Chasing results, answering emails, and fitting in home visits, often left them reaching home after 8pm at night.
The fact is that the government has a strategy to implode traditional NHS GP practices through withdrawal of funding, in order to ‘reconfigure’ primary care into totally different structures.
Recent King’s Fund publications call for the independent contractor status of traditional GP practices, labelled the ‘corner shop model’, to be abolished, so that they can be replaced with ‘scale’ organisations including private companies.
The proposed ‘federations, networks and super partnerships’ which would ‘integrate’ the provision of general practice with community care and other ‘out of hospital services’ and some secondary care, would cover populations of 250,000 to one million.
These would become ‘accountable care organisations’ which commission, provide and are modelled on American health maintenance insurance organisations like Kaiser Permanente.
The huge attacks on general practice are mirrored by the sustained government onslaught on district general hospitals (DGHs), through cutting their funding and then using failure regimes to close them.
‘The new CE of NHS England, Simon Stevens, freshly recruited from the US health insurance giant UnitedHealth, said in a recent interview that: ‘In some cases we’re going to have to completely reinvent what we mean by a hospital, by a local hospital.
‘We’re going to have to say that the division between what consultants do in hospitals and what GPs do in community settings, that is going to be dissolved.’
Today’s march is a rallying call to whole of the medical profession, healthcare staff, and the public to mobilise to stop the decimation of our GP practices and DGHs.
It begins at 2.30pm at St Katherine’s Practice, Nightingale House, Thomas More Street, E1.