GP CRISIS – SITUATION CRITICAL
- Long waits for appointments
- Lack of GPs – unsafe workload
- Hugely underfunded
- NHS Practices amalgamated
- Reorganisations – less accountable to public
“Our GP surgeries are the vital first port of call for all health care in Lewisham. We need properly funded GP practices to meet
the health needs of our growing population.” Lewisham Community Nurse
These are some of the issues causing real concern to people in Lewisham.
Many people blame GP practices when they can’t get an appointment for several weeks but in fact the Government has utterly failed to train and recruit enough doctors to add to the GP workforce and replace those who are retiring.
Below is the text of a leaflet the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign has just produced. If you wish to collect some leaflets to put into your GP surgery so that other patients can read about the real situation, please email us on savelewishamhospital@yahoo.com
Click here to see/download the leaflet
What’s happening to General Practice services in Lewisham?
General Practice in Lewisham as elsewhere in England is facing huge problems. Stressed GPs are struggling to recruit medical staff and face rising workloads and vacancies. Patients are waiting too long for appointments, are not getting to see their preferred doctor and losing continuity of care.
Over half of GPs feel they can no longer provide a safe service.
A decade of neglect by successive governments has damaged general practice.
Funding has gone down as a percentage of NHS funding, and instead of the promised 5000 more GPs we have 1000 fewer GPs than in 2015!
Time to help our GPs
Lewisham GPs rallied to help save Lewisham Hospital when it was threatened with closure. Now we must help them – so that our GPs survive, thrive and provide good services for us all.
We demand more GPs, more resources!
General Practice, like the rest of the NHS, urgently needs better funding and more GPs and other clinical staff. Instead, we have yet more costly reorganisations. The Government says it is helping GPs by funding new ‘Primary Care Networks’ (PCNs) that will bring extra non-GP staff into primary care. But, welcome though that would be if it materialised, we still need more GPs. The extra 2% a year funding for General Practice nowhere near matches need. PCNs will be answerable to huge new area structures called Integrated Care Systems – not to local people.
We need more accountability not less
Our local voice really matters! Lewisham Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) – the GP body that plans local health services – helped save Lewisham Hospital, using its authority to oppose the closure. Now NHS England intends to abolish all six borough CCGs in SE London, including Lewisham – without consultation. And the SE London reorganisation brings in one huge Integrated Care System (ICS) of the merged CCG and all the NHS providers. One giant system for 1.9 million people,
This strangles the voice of the community and the local authority. Big decisions will be remote and unaccountable. Never again will we have a local CCG that can listen to us and oppose dangerous plans for our local health services.
We call for:
• Significantly increased funding for General Practice
• More GPs, more practice nurses and other staff
• Continuity of care and access to a GP who knows us
• Stronger patient and public say in Lewisham & SE London NHS plans
• Genuine public consultation on mergers or closures of GP practices –
we oppose the takeover of practices by large corporate providers.
• Stop SE London’s CCG merger. Save Lewisham CCG!
