Letter to patients

Explaining current pressures and collective action in primary care.

 

Dear Patients,

As you will be aware the NHS, and general practice in particular, is going through a difficult time. We are writing to explain the current pressures we are under, what we are doing to provide the best possible care in these circumstances and how we are trying to ensure the practice remains viable now and in the future.

We believe the current funding of general practice is inadequate. We are only given 30p per day to look after each registered patient – less than the cost of an apple.

It has been widely covered by the press and local media that GP practices are proposing to take collective action to put pressure on the government to increase the share of the NHS budget that comes to local surgeries.  We are writing to let you know that, in common with most practices nationally, St Augustine’s is taking part.

Firstly, we want to reassure you that this is not a strike. These are permanent measures that are being taken to ensure general practice is safe.

We are concerned about three main areas:

  1. Patient Safety: The numbers of patient consultations we complete in a day means that we are not always practising as safely as we would like
  2. Workforce: The huge workload is making it difficult to recruit and retain staff, and levels of burnout are high
  3. Funding: We are not being funded sufficiently to recruit more staff for the demand we are facing.

Pressure on the system has been steadily increasing due to a number of factors including a declining GP workforce (each GP is now looking after more patients) and increasing health needs of patients. Due to the current long hospital waiting lists, GP’s are having to support patients in their own practices for longer until they can be seen by a specialist.

Collective action highlights these problems and provides a framework for general practice to both provide the best possible care whilst protecting the staff who work within the practice. 

What this means for you

The practice will be fully open, and you can contact us in the usual way via our online service, by phone or in person.

  • All doctors will have a maximum of 25 appointments per day, as this is the safe limit recommended by the British Medical Association.  We will work to ensure that we have enough appointments to see patients that need to be seen urgently. We have recently changed our appointment system to ensure this happens and make sure all requests are triaged before an appointment is offered. We do concede though that there may be a longer wait for routine appointments. If we have reached our capacity we may direct you to call 111. We will also refer you to urgent care centres, minor injury units or a local pharmacy if we feel they can help you.
  • We will return work to other healthcare providers, such as hospitals, where they should have completed that part of care. This includes onward referrals, fit notes, starting prescriptions, further investigations, and responding to patient queries. Your healthcare provider should fully complete your episode of care without asking a GP practice to do any of this work for them. 
  • We will not take over prescribing some medications that are started by specialists, unless there is funding for this work.  (Patients already receiving medications under ‘shared care’ arrangements will not be affected.)
  • We will not provide monitoring checks for certain conditions, where this should be done by your hospital/specialist team.

Please be assured we are taking every possible step to minimise disruption to your care.

How you can help us

We hope the this explains the current pressures on general practice and what we are doing to best help you whilst keeping the practice open now and in the future. Please be kind to our staff. They want you to get the care you need and will do everything they can to help.

Kind regards,

Dr Woodward     Dr Fletcher    Dr Reddy    Dr Rance    Dr Jewell 

The St Augustine’s Medical Practice Partners