DAVID Cameron has been invited to an Oxford GP practice to see first-hand the recruitment crisis hitting the service.

Family doctors across the county have said the Prime Minister’s promise of £400m for surgeries to open seven days a week will be little use unless he can solve current problems.

This was despite Mr Cameron moving his wife to tears during his speech at the Conservative conference in Manchester when he described how the NHS cared for his dying son.

The Witney MP announced on Monday he would “ensure” everyone could see a GP on a weekend by 2020.

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Practices will be invited to bid for a share of £400m over the next five years to fund it.

Sue Smith, practice manager of The Manor Surgery, Headington, said the PM should come and spend the morning seeing the pressure on doctors.

She said: “GPs are finding the demand and expectation on their services increasingly difficult.

“We are finding it difficult to manage an increasing number of patients when our practice is the same size.”

And Tony Love, practice manager of one of the PM’s constituency practices, the White House surgery in Chipping Norton, said: “It’s a very big aspiration with little detail. We have a recruitment crisis, there just aren’t GPs coming into the system.

“It’s no longer seen as an attractive profession because funding is going down all the time.

“The workload is forever increasing. We are almost at breaking point.”

Mr Love, 62, of Carterton, asked: “How is he going to support us going forward?”

In survey of 200 Oxfordshire surgeries this year, 71 per cent said one or more GPs had “burn-out due to increasing and unsustainable pressure of work”.

The survey was carried out by Andrew McHugh, practice manager of Banbury’s Horsefair Surgery, who said it was “a matter of urgency that the root causes of the crisis are identified and addressed”.

Abingdon Surgery GP Prit Buttar, chairman of the British Medical Association’s local medical committee (LMC), called the plan a “triumph of wants over need”.

Oxford Mail:

Prit Buttar, chairman of the British Medical Association’s local medical committee

He said: “If you spend that money on weekend access you can’t spend it on removing cataracts or hip replacements.

“GPs across the country are facing a crisis between funding and workload and the pressures that have created this crisis, like the ageing population, will get worse.

“That is without opening an extra two days a week.”

City GP Paul Roblin, chief executive of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Local Medical Committees said: “GPs cannot currently cope with demands made on them over five days.

Oxford Mail:

Paul Roblin, chief executive of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Local Medical Committees

“Who will do the work if its volume increased by another two fifths?”

Up to 600 surgeries in Britain could close over the next year because of the crisis, Dr Maureen Baker, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said yesterday.

The county’s NHS watchdog Healthwatch Oxfordshire welcomed the PM’s commitment to increase patient access to GPs.

But chief executive Rachel Coney said: "Our health care system is under pressure and such an initiative will require an appropriate increase in resources which we hope the Government will be able to meet, not least in ensuring an adequate number of GPs in primary care.”

Simon Stevens, CEO of NHS England said: “Patients want quicker more convenient family doctor appointments, and frankly they're right - but it's also true that most GPs are already working flat out.

“The only way of squaring that circle is with substantial new investment in primary care combined with new technology and radically new ways of working.”


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