The next Government should take urgent action to address GP unemployment, the BMA has demanded in its general election manifesto.
The doctors’ union said that the party winning the upcoming general election should ‘cut red tape to allow practices to hire GPs and reduce GP locum unemployment’.
It confirmed to Pulse that it was referring to the additional roles reimbursement scheme (ARRS) specifically, which currently does not include GPs but only ‘additional’ professions.
The document added that ‘absurd barriers’ preventing doctors from taking on more work ‘must be removed’, including those caused by restrictions in the GP contract that ‘prevent practices in England from using existing funding to hire more GPs’.
It comes after the union’s GP registrars committee Dr Malinga Ratwatte warned that of the 4,000 registrars achieving their CCT over the summer, many may struggle to find work, due to the current employment crisis.
And the BMA is currently surveying GP locums, asking them to share their experiences, as Pulse reported that GPs are driving across England, staying in hotels overnight and driving up to four hours on a daily basis to get locum work amid a shortage of shifts available.
According to the BMA’s manifesto, the new Government should also deliver a new GP contract for England and Wales that ‘safeguards sustainable NHS GP partnerships’ to deliver ‘better services’ for patients.
‘Governments must work in partnership with GPs across the UK in securing GP contract reform where mutually required,’ the manifesto added.
The BMA also called for urgent action to halt the recruitment and expansion of medical ‘associate’ roles such as physician associates, that ‘are being used to substitute doctors and devalue medical expertise’.
BMA chair of council Professor Philip Banfield said: ‘We have an understaffed, under-resourced and under-performing health service, an exhausted and underpaid workforce and an increasingly unwell population.
‘The next Government risks the collapse of free-at-the-point-of-need healthcare if it fails to address these issues and reverse the damage caused by years of austerity politics.
‘All parties must make the health of the country, and health services, their top priority, so that doctors and healthcare staff can do their jobs safely and properly.
‘Tackling waiting list backlogs, increasing productivity of the NHS and improving patient safety all depend on positive engagement with the medical profession.
‘Having enough doctors, with their unique skills and expertise, is at the core of this.’
In March, NHS England said it is not looking at adding GPs to the ARRS because it is not designed to ‘compensate for a shortage of core capacity’ in practices.
The BMA has previously called the inclusion of GPs in ARRS an obvious solution’ to practices’ financial and workforce issues, while a petition with the same goal gathered thousands of signatures.
The BMA’s GP Committee has made it clear that regardless who gets into power, it will go ahead with its ballot of GP partners over collective action that would start in August.
Key GP points from the BMA’s manifesto
- Cut red tape to allow practices to hire GPs and reduce GP locum unemployment
- Deliver a new GP contract for England and Wales that safeguards sustainable NHS GP partnerships to deliver better services for patients. Governments must work in partnership with GPs across the UK in securing GP contract reform where mutually required.
- Regulate MAPs by the Health and Care Professions Council; amend the legislation which regulates them by the General Medical Council (GMC), the doctors’ regulator. Legislate to protect the titles ‘assistant’ and not ‘associate’
- Halt the unsafe substitution of doctors by other professionals in medical care and pause any further recruitment of MAPs until the medical profession’s patient safety concerns are fully addressed
- Guarantee jobs for all UK medical school graduates and improve the job allocation process for newly qualified doctors
- Deliver existing promises to expand undergraduate medical education and postgraduate medical training, and, critically, fund the medical educators and facilities required to realise these promises.
- Invest in NHS infrastructure, with a capital funding injection to fix the maintenance backlog, improve community and GP estates, upgrade digital and IT systems, invest in research, innovation and new technology, and invest in hospitals
Source: BMA
When you pay practices to employ others , specifically excluding doctors , the question needs to be asked what is the agenda?
So GPs will be employed by PCNs , thats the end of General practice as it is.
Sadly, if GPs are to be added to ARRS these doctors will likely service the ICB trumpeted same day access hubs thus contributing to ever more fragmented, non continuous care and subsequently worse outcomes for patients. Come across many patients already that have been seen by us multiple times in our practice and they’ve had much more significant conditions over the ‘minor ailments’ that they would have presumed to have had by non medical and centralised triage teams that triage them into seeing a PA. It’s going to be a really sad picture in a few years.
£1.4 billion pounds to recruit non-doctors into General Practice resulting in redundancies and unemployment for several thousand real doctors/GPs – make sense? Sheer insanity.and stupidity, unless the real goal here is to force privatisation of the GP sector. Labour are silent while GPs are without work, some now driving taxis and working for Tesco! (GP Online)