General practice does not have the capacity to meet the needs of all patients, DAUK\u2019s GP committee has told national radio listeners.\r\n\r\nDr Steve Taylor, GP spokesperson for the Doctors Association UK (DAUK), reiterated our call for more investment in general practice.\r\n\r\nSpeaking on LBC News, Dr Taylor said general practice had effectively had a one-fifth cut in funding in the past decade.\r\n\r\nThis had led to GPs being unemployed or underemployed, while demand for general practice was rising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said: \u201cThe biggest problem is we don\u2019t have the capacity for all the requests and needs of patients.\r\n\r\n\u201cGP practices have effectively had a 20 per cent funding cut over the past eight or nine years, which means there are currently unemployed GPs or GPs doing less work than they would otherwise do if the funding was there.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe could have a lot more access to GPs if the funding was made available.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Government has talked about moving care from hospitals into the community, but the money has to be there so we can employ some of those GPs.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m campaigning to get more money into general practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI would love to see more access to GPs.\u201d\r\n\r\nDr Taylor was discussing new figures which showed a third (33.3%) of GP appointments in England were carried out on the phone or online.\r\n\r\nAccording to new analysis of NHS England data by the PA news agency, the figure was up from 30.9% in June 2024, and 28.3% in June 2023.\r\n\r\nDr Taylor said the figures did not show that the total number of appointments in each year has also risen.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ve got a bigger proportion that are not face-to-face,\u201d he said. \u201cBut actually, you\u2019ve also got more face-to-face appointments in GP surgeries up and down the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m not entirely sure what the problem is with telephone and e-consults anyway.\r\n\r\n\u201cI have been a GP for 30 years, and we\u2019ve adapted to people\u2019s needs over that time.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m also a patient. I\u2019ve had two telephone consultations with my GP in the past two weeks, which were entirely appropriate.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s two pictures. The first is that face-to-face appointments aren\u2019t falling off, they\u2019re actually going up every year.\r\n\r\n\u201cSecondly, telephone and e-consults are also going up and are good, so I\u2019m not sure what the issue is.\u201d\r\n\r\nPlease support our work by contributing to our crowd funder<\/a> or by becoming a member<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" General practice does not have the capacity to meet the needs of all patients, DAUK\u2019s GP committee has told national radio listeners. Dr Steve Taylor,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,59],"tags":[22,61,304,669],"class_list":["post-1411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dauk-news","category-general-practice","tag-dr-steve-taylor","tag-general-practice","tag-gp-committee","tag-gp-funding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1411","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=1411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}