An apple a day…

GPs are funded by head of population, so for every person who is registered with a GP, the Practice received £107.57 to look after you each year as part of the core GP contract. Additional funding coming into General Practice means that this rises to £163 per patient in total.

For that money, on average people are seen 6 times a year. This works out as GPs seeing the equivalent of the entire population every 2 months. This is the average, some people never go the GP, some go a lot! To put that funding into perspective, that is less than a latte at your favourite coffee shop not even every day but one a week, for looking after your entire care in General Practice!

That isn’t the end thought. That money also covers all of the things that happen behind the scenes that you may not be aware of. It funds the overseeing of prescribing and the additional work passed on from secondary care after seeing patients in outpatients clinics. It funds home visits, the palliative care, the chronic disease management, administration, training, safeguarding, supervision. The list goes on and on.

Clearly it isn’t enough. The funding into general practice hasn’t kept up with inflation and therefore we have seen an overall loss to practice income. If funding had just kept up with inflation, the figure should be over £200 for each patient, without even looking at the additional income needed to keep up with increased demand and complexity. This gap is one of the major reasons why it may take longer to see us. The extra money would have allowed us to recruit more GPs to be able to see more patients more quickly.

Collectively we must fight to address this. More funding to General Practice means we can do more to provide better services for Middlewood patients. If you get the chance, please speak to your Prospective Candidates in the upcoming election and afterwards to the elected MP.

This needs to change for all of us. Middlewood is on your side. We all, together, ‘aim to deliver caring, first class healthcare in a responsive and safe manner’