A healthcare think-tank has identified a widening postcode lottery for patients in accessing GP appointments.
The research from the Nuffield Trust has found patients in some parts of England face a steeper uphill struggle to access a GP than others.
People in Gloucester, for example, have 45% more GPs per head than those in Kent and Medway (1,868 patients per GP versus 2,702). The government has also failed to meet a pledge to deliver 6,000 more GPs by 2024-25, it claimed.
Incentives to attract GPs to underserved areas, including £20,000 ‘golden hellos’, are not well understood and little evidence exists on their attractiveness to doctors in training.
The trust has also identified a 19% fall in health visitors and an 8% fall in learning disability nurses, with the latter contributing to a 44% reduction in learning disability nurses since 2010.
Access to primary care
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Nuffield Trust senior fellow Dr Billy Palmer said: “The public are all too aware of staff shortages, long waits and disruptive strikes creating real difficulties for health and care services and they deserve bold action from government to address these workforce challenges.
“Growing the NHS workforce is popular, and an ambitious workforce plan already exists, but to succeed it needs to be accompanied by robust policies or we risk wasting money, time and talented people too early in their NHS careers.
“Solely boosting the number of staff nationally in the NHS is not enough alone – the next government should set a clear aim of reducing the uneven distribution of key staffing groups and shortfalls to tackle unfairness in access for patients.
“This could be in the form of minimum numbers of GPs compared to patients in local areas, and better incentives to attract GPs to under-doctored areas should be considered,” Dr Palmer added.
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