1 week Ago By Christine Jardine
I had to visit the GP this week, several times in fact, and several different practices. It is not a problem with my health, but a serious issue facing not only each of them, but GP practices and many others across the country. And it’s a long time since I came away from a doctor’s surgery in such a negative frame of mind.
These are the professionals on whom working people depend to protect our health, be the gatekeepers and guides to the acute services which can mean the difference between life and death. Many of us have gone into in our GPs office thinking we had something innocent only to set out on a route of diagnosis, treatment and lifesaving surgery thanks to their attention. More than 90 per cent of the medical care in this country is provided by GP practices, on only 10 per cent of the health budget.
Just four years ago we took to our doorsteps every Thursday to thank the health and care sector, for putting themselves on the line during the Covid crisis. And yet now they tell me that this could be the final straw for them. As I left each office in turn I had the clear impression that GP practices could now themselves be facing an existential crisis created by our new Chancellor’s first budget.
Like charities, independent care providers, NHS dentists, pharmacies and hospices, they will get no exemption from the increases to employers National Insurance contributions, in the way that publicly owned services will. For some practices that is going mean tens of thousands of pounds more on their annual salary bill. In the seven years that I have been the MP for Edinburgh West the pressure on our primary care services have been reflected in an ever increasing number of emails about shortages of GPs or difficulty getting appointments.
There is even one practice in my constituency which is now unable to take on more patients. This week, I felt more acutely than before that the cradle to grave NHS care that we all take for granted may be under serious threat Yet four months ago, almost to the day, we welcomed in a Labour Government that most people hoped, indeed felt had promised them, a new era for our public services. As a Liberal Democrat I initially welcomed, warmly, the UK Government’s investment in our NHS which will bring more than £4bn to Scotland over the next two years.
But now I am frustrated and disappointed that the total package does not offer the protection to those needing medical care that we had anticipated. I suspect there will be those, particularly senior members of the Labour Party, who will repeat the increasingly exasperating mantra of blaming the previous Conservative Government. That black hole.
Again. They may well be correct. But we need more than empty rhetoric.
With my colleagues in the Liberal Democrats I have written to the Chancellor Rachel Reeves expressing our concern and calling on her to exempt GP surgeries, social care providers, hospices, NHS dentists, charitable providers of health and care, and pharmacies from the increase in employers' National Insurance contributions. We all, the working people that the Government tells us they want to protect, need her to listen..
