GPs used as 'soft target' for NHS problems

GPs used as 'soft target' for NHS problems Chair of Royal College of GPs hits out at politicians including health secretary Jeremy Hunt for unfairly blaming GPs for NHS failures.

Family doctors are being deliberately targeted by ministers and unfairly blamed for the growing problems in the NHS, the leader of Britain's GPs has said.

In a message directed at health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who has angered the profession by demanding that they resume responsibility for out-of-hours care, Dr Clare Gerada denounced politicians using GPs as a "soft target".

"It can sometimes feel as if we're in the midst of an orchestrated campaign against us. We're constantly under fire because we're a soft target for politicians and the media," the chair of the Royal College of GPs told 1,500 family doctors at the college's annual conference.

"They hold us unfairly responsible for anything that goes wrong in the NHS – for the failures in emergency departments and social care, for the problems with bed-blocking. Berating us for not working out of hours … You name it, our hard-working profession is under fire almost daily," Gerada added.

During a question and answer session with Hunt after he also spoke at the event, several GPs told him that the coalition's plan for GP surgeries to open from 8am until 8pm and at weekends – a key announcement at the Conservative conference earlier this week – would not work without primary care receiving extra resources. "You can have [greater] access or you can have continuity [of care], but you can't have both," one GP said, warning that family doctors are not an unlimited resource that can provide everything ministers expect.

In an emollient encounter with the GPs, Hunt agreed that primary care needed more than the 2,000 extra doctors he has already committed to – although the RCGP says 10,000 are needed – as well as a bigger share of NHS funding, but made no specific pledges on either.

He did, though, promise more immediate action to cut the number of checks that GPs have to carry out under the terms of the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF), which rewards them for carrying out certain tasks with particular types of patients. That would free up some extra time for GPs to see other patients and enhance their clinical independence to decide which patients need to be seen.

The British Medical Association has recently criticised the amount of bureaucracy GPs face. Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the BMA's GPs committee, has cited the "large number of lengthy and clinically dubious questionnaires that ask how many hours patients spend on gardening, cooking and DIY" and the fact that GPs have to check the blood pressure of healthy 35- to 40-year-olds as a waste of their valuable time, resulting in fewer appointments available for needier patients.

Hunt also sought to rebuild bridges with GPs by praising their key role in the NHS and importance in helping to realise what he meant when he said the ageing population should be the NHS's new ambition – "to make Britain the best country in the world to grow old in". The Guardian