GP appointment woes can’t be laid at Tony Blair’s door - Yorkshire Post Letters

Mr Peter Rickaby wrote in your December 10 edition that the blame for the current problems in getting a GP appointment should be laid at the door of Tony Blair‘s government and the new contract they introduced in 2002. He could not be more wrong.

Those of us who were working in general practice at the time know the truth – that in the years prior to this new contract, morale was at such a low ebb that mass resignations were imminent. The out of hours workload, in particular, was rising relentlessly, even as we were being starved of resources year-on-year.

Mr Rickaby’s statement that Tony Blair scrapped night and weekend callouts is completely false. What actually happened was that the night and weekend callouts began, finally, to be done by a different group of GPs – ones who were well rested before their shift began.

Mr Rickaby needs to understand that an exhausted doctor is every bit as dangerous as an exhausted HGV driver or airline pilot – and in those occupations they have had very strict controls over excessive working hours for years, for this very reason.

For the roots of this problem, he needs to look at the more recent past. Already in 2015, recruitment and retention were starting to plummet as a result of more years of under resourcing by the Tories.

In that year the health secretary, one Jeremy Hunt, promised to recruit 6000 more GPs by 2021. When 2021 arrived, numbers had actually fallen by 1500, not least because of the government’s imbecilic destruction of the NHS pension scheme, which they are now belatedly thinking about reversing.

This was also the Health Secretary that refused to implement the findings of a pandemic–planning exercise that the NHS ran in 2018 (operation Cygnus), chief among which was the provision of a stockpile of effective PPE for the whole NHS.

As a direct result of this monumental failure, more than 280 NHS workers, including at least 20 GPs, have died of Covid, and many more have been forced into early retirement by the effects of long Covid. This is where the blame lies for the current parlous state of NHS primary care, Mr Rickaby.