Investigation finds hundreds of GP surgeries are closing their lists to new arrivals, forcing out existing patients or facing closure
Soaring numbers of GP practices are demanding to close their doors to new patients and force current patients to go elsewhere as doctors warn that services are “teetering on the brink of collapse”.
New figures show that last year 104 GP practices applied to NHS authorities for permission to stop accepting patients – more than twice as many as two years before.
A further 45 surgeries asked to “shrink” their practice boundaries, throwing existing patients off their lists, while 100 more practices are threatened with closure, an investigation by Pulse magazine found.
Doctors said they were unable to cope with “vast numbers of people” moving into some parts of the country, forcing them to close their lists to newcomers, or divert existing patients to new surgeries.
Dr Maureen Baker, chairman of the Royal College of General Practice, said the situation was “extremely distressing” and having a “severe impact” on patient care. . . [Full text]
Lack of access to basic primary health care is of concern outside the United Kingdom as well. Despite the existing shortage of general practitioners, activists intent on suppressing freedom of conscience within the medical profession insist that physicians unwilling to provide morally contested procedures like abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide and contraception should get out of general practice or leave medicine altogether. [See, for example, Doctors who oppose abortion should leave family medicine: Ontario College of Physicians]. It would seem, from their perspective, that it is better for people to be deprived of access to a physician altogether than to allow physicians who refuse to do what they believe to be wrong to remain in practice.