The Doctors\u2019 Association UK (DAUK) has reacted to the Government’s 10-year health plan for the NHS.\r\n\r\nPrime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting have today set out their Plan for Change.\r\n\r\nNeighbourhood health services will be rolled out across the country, they said. They will bring together diagnostics, mental health, post-op, rehab, and nursing to people\u2019s doorsteps.\r\n\r\nNeighbourhood health centres will house services under one roof, open at evenings and weekends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Plan for Change will rebuild the NHS to train thousands more family doctors, transform hospital outpatient appointments, and provide personalised care plans for complex needs, Mr Starmer and Mr Streeting said.\r\n\r\nDAUK\u2019s GP spokesperson Dr Steve Taylor said: \u201cIt\u2019s good to see that the Government is working towards bringing more care into the community and has the aim of bringing back the family doctor and ending the 8 am rush.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe problem with the 10-year plan is that it focuses on neighbourhood health centres without acknowledging there are already more than 6,000 neighbourhood health centres in the community called GP practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cInvestment in GPs and GP practices would be cheaper. We have a crisis of unemployed and underemployed GPs who could step in now to provide care in the community and help solve the two aims of the Labour manifesto. Both of which we and patients agree on.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe danger of a top down, secondary care-led community health structure is that it will be much more costly than reinforcing the current structures.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere are ways to do this in line with Government priorities and Lord Darzi\u2019s review which would solve the problems quickly and with less expensive options.\r\n\r\n\u201cMore care in the community, yes, but not via privately run big centres, where continuity of care, personal support and patient centred care is lost.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
DAUK chair Ms Helen Fernandes called for more detail on funding. She warned the 10-year plan would be \u2018nothing more than political posturing\u2019 without investment.\r\n\r\nMs Fernandes said: \u201cWe await to see the detail of the 10-year plan but we need the investment in general practice, in the hundreds of unemployed and underemployed GPs, and in our estates to bring it up to scratch.\r\n\r\n\u201cWithout that investment the 10-year plan feels like a Government trying to win political points scoring on big changes to the NHS that promise the public everything but are actually undeliverable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr Ellen Welch, DAUK vice chair and a GP in Cumbria, added: \u201cOne of the biggest asks DAUK made ahead of the general election was for a cross-party collaborative to focus on the NHS to avoid successive Governments reorganising the service every Cabinet shuffle.\r\n\r\n\u201cOnce again it looks like we\u2019re set for another reorganisation.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s frustrating is it\u2019s often the same people who are already in position, doing similar jobs with slightly differently titles, all at great expense.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe already have teams of experts bedded into local communities – they\u2019re called GPs.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt would save a lot of time and reshuffling to involve them and give them the funding to provide adequate care.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr Matt Kneale, DAUK\u2019s resident doctor and former chair, said: \u201cWe await urgent action from the Government to avoid an impending unemployment crisis for British doctors trying to progress into further training, where bottlenecks are already threatening the future workforce.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe also want to see signs the Government is serious about ending the exploitation of international medical graduates (IMGs), who are too often treated as a cash cow with no long-term plan to integrate and retain them.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is equally important to ensure that IMGs already working and contributing in the UK are not unfairly excluded from future workforce planning.\r\n\r\n\u201cTraining more doctors from medical school through to consultancy is a necessary and welcome step \u2014 but with medical students fearing unemployment, facing limited funding in their final years, and struggling to access world-class training under overstretched clinicians, there is still much to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr Kneale added: \u201cWith the publication of the Leng Review on physician associates and anaesthesia associates imminent, we urge the Government to use this moment to clarify and reaffirm the distinct role of the medically-trained doctor.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere is growing unease in the profession at the direction of travel \u2014 towards a fragmented, task-based model of care which implies that \u2018anyone can do it\u2019.\r\n\r\n“Medicine cannot be reduced to a series of checklists and delegated tasks. It is a complex, deeply responsible profession that demands a medical degree and years of further training.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe call on ministers to commit to reversing the de-professionalisation of medical care, and instead recognise that safe, high-quality NHS care must be doctor-led, not protocol-led.\r\n\r\n\u201cPatients deserve to be treated by properly trained doctors \u2014 not just because they expect it, but because it is safer.\u201d\r\n\r\nPlease support our work by joining DAUK<\/a> or donating to our GoFundMe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Doctors\u2019 Association UK (DAUK) has reacted to the Government’s 10-year health plan for the NHS. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,59,58],"tags":[324,17,22,304,644,132],"class_list":["post-1402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dauk-news","category-general-practice","category-the-nhs","tag-dr-ellen-welch","tag-dr-matt-kneale","tag-dr-steve-taylor","tag-gp-committee","tag-ms-helen-fernandes","tag-nhs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}