In defence of GPs ‘collective action’: We all want better access to doctors - thank them for making a stand

All anyone has been saying for years is how poor GP services are these days. It’s right up there with the state of NHS dentistry as is the thing I hear people complaining about the most.

And they have every right. I’m old enough to remember when you phoned the GP and if it was urgent you’d see someone that day, and if not, certainly that week. You didn’t have to convince gatekeeper receptionists that you might not make it through to the afternoon if you don’t get to see someone soon.

Once upon a time, largely speaking, you even got to see your GP, not whoever might be available any given day. And you actually got to see a GP - not a nurse, not a paramedic (yes that happened to me), not someone on the end of a phone - an actual GP, in person. I’m even old enough that a GP actually came to our house once as my mother had recently given birth and needed to see a doctor. So he came to her. Imagine that!

But those days are long gone. In a few years time we might be talking to a robot. Who knows? But right now, GPs are fighting to restore the service they offer to levels at least something like we used to enjoy. Receptionists don’t want to be the inquisitor at 8am every day, and GPs don’t want to whizz you in and out in 10 minutes.

In fact, GPs have been asking for better funding for some time, not for pay rises, but to employ more doctors and other staff to improve the quality of care they can offer. And it has fallen on deaf ears. So what choice do they have? Well, they can take collective action and try to force the hands of those in charge to listen to them and do something about it.

Yet what do the public do? Attack the GPs for being ‘greedy’ and accuse them of not putting their patients first, of risking lives by making a stand. There is a huge amount of misinformation swirling as to what is going to happen when GPs carry out this ‘collective action’ and the reasons for doing so, which is why I was pleased to see Dr Amir Khan on Good Morning Britain today to explain what was going to happen and why.

The full-time GP and best selling author took great pains to hammer home that they were not asking for a pay rise but for more funding so services could be improved. He also explained that they would not be striking, but taking collective action, meaning they are not walking out, merely doing the work they have been contracted to do and no more.

He said: “What that means is working to rule, it means working to the contracts that we have with the NHS, and the reason we're doing this is because we've been asking for years and years to improve funding into Primary Care so we can offer more appointments to patients.

“So patients can get seen in a timely manner, and we, more importantly, can spend time with the patients who need that time. Currently we’re seeing patients every 10 minutes, and it's really complex stuff we're dealing with. I often do go home and think about the patients I've seen and worry about whether I’ve given the best of the care that I could have possibly done, because of those time constraints.

“So what we're asking for is, at the moment we get 6% of the NHS budget into Primary Care, we see 90% of the patients across the NHS, we want a 15% slice of that NHS budget. We don't want it immediately, we want 1% increases over time.”

He went on to explain how that extra funding could pay to employ more doctors and nurses. He added: “The key message here is we want the same thing that patients want. We want timely access to GPs and GPs who can spend time with their patients.

While GPs ‘work to rule’ they have said they will cap the number of patients they see each day to 25 - which, not by accident, is the same number of patients GPs have been arguing is the ‘safe’ number of patients to see. Currently GPs are seeing much larger numbers, Dr Khan explained: “At the moment on average I might see 40 patients a day, if I'm on call, that can go up to 70 or 80 patients a day, and that just isn’t safe.”

Sadly we have come to a situation where some short term pain of GPs working to rule may just lead to long term gain. One day the 8am scramble to get a sacred appointment could be a thing of the past, in the future we might once again sit in front of our familiar GP and have the time to really get to the bottom of what is wrong with us, and maybe, just maybe, we won’t have to describe all our ailments to Babara on reception in order to do it all again for a medical professional later on.

GPs have tried asking and have been ignored, so now they have come out fighting. And we should be joining them in that fight, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the medics who want better services for their patients. Because that, actually, is what we all want.