Collective Action - Letter from the Partners

Dear patients

I am writing to you again now to let you know that all GP practices in England are taking collective action this autumn. At present, this action is to be joined up across all practices in our region, and intended to reset some of the boundaries that over time have been blurred for us.

For now, we want to give you some overall information about this.

Why has collective action been taken?

Action was started on the 4th and is planned to increase over the next few months.

• General Practice is desperately underfunded. We receive a fixed amount per year, whether you are a patient who attends once per year or once per week.
• General Practice deals with over 90% of all patient contacts within the NHS.
• General Practice receives less than 7% of the total NHS budget (whereas we used to get about 11%).
• The real terms decrease in GP funding has been going on for about the last 10 years. 
• Our practice provides 20% more appointmnets per month than before the covid-19 pandemic.

What action is being taken?

• We will not be going on strike.
• We will not be breaching our contract with the NHS.
• Instead, we will be stopping doing work that we are not actually paid for.
• That includes options such as:
  • Limiting each GP to 25 patient contacts per day (which is deemed to be the safe limit by the European Union of GPs and the British Medical Association).
  • Stop all voluntary services we currently offer to help colleages in other parts of the NHS. Effectively we currently do a lot of work that we shouldn't have to do.
  • Refer all patients to hospital when it is clinically right to do that. At present, we follow very complex guidelines to limit the number of patients we refer and try to treat as many as possible in General Practice.
  • Refuse to sign up to any new NHS pilot schemes that we often participate in without enough funding to cover the work we do. 
• All GP Practices in England are currently considering which steps they will take. All GP partners in England voted in a referendum recently about whether collective action was needed. Over 98% of them decided it was.

We are aware that these steps will impact our patients.

That is the last thing we want to do - but equally, if we don't take action now, the Partners here believe that the future of General Practice as a whole is a risk.

We will always prioritise patient safety in any actions we take. If you have any concerns, please do contact us.

Please also feel free to contact your local MP if you feel that any of the above points need action by the government and the NHS.

Yours sincerely,

Horfield Health Centre Partners

BMA Guidance

For more information from the BMA about collective action, please visit Safe working in general practice toolkit

Patient Consultation

We have consulted with the PPG around the collective action, and they are fully supportive of this. 

Published: Nov 22, 2024