The British Medical Association (BMA) is launching collective action this week among GP practices. The motto for the campaign is "Protect your patients, protect your GP practice".
This is NOT industrial action, and NOT about pay - it is to pressurise the government to invest more in primary care and amend the GP contract so that we can employ enough doctors, nurses and staff to provide sufficient appointments and work safely.
The main action is to limit daily patient contacts per clinician to a recommended safe level of 25 per day and to divert patients to local pharmacy, urgent care settings and 111 once daily maximum capacity has been reached. This action will commence on Monday 12th August 2024.
We have done our very best at Newburn Surgery to provide extra capacity. We exceed well above the recommended 25 contacts per day on a daily basis and this is unsustainable. We need to take action now so General Practice has a chance of survival.
This is not something we undertake lightly but we do support the nationwide and countywide campaign to improve funding in primary care so that surgeries can move forwards with sufficient staffing and capacity to provide the quality of care we all want for ourselves and all patients.
We hope that the issues will be resolved swiftly, and that general practice can have a brighter future as a result.
Dr Lorna Carter, Dr Sajni Gupta, Dr Ian Morgan, Dr Katie Turner