|Rant warning on

 Health Education England have a workforce strategy out for consultation at the moment. The document is titled ‘Facing the Facts, Shaping the Future – a draft health and care workforce strategy for England to 2027’. The strategy and links can be found here https://www.hee.nhs.uk/our-work/workforce-strategy.

 The document contains a detailed description of current workforce numbers and challenges mixed in with government propaganda and policy initiatives. The document is 141 pages long and the section about wider primary care is just over a mere two pages. The document starts by acknowledging that data from NHS Digital shows that the GP head count has now fallen to 2012 levels (and conveniently forgets that if you turn these into full time equivalents the number of FTE GPs is at 2004 levels!).

There is lots of information about increasing workload and pressure from demographics in secondary care but nothing about workload pressures in general practice. They could very easily have used data from the Kings Fund (2016) – click here for the link that shows that the number of face to face consultations with GPs had increased by 13.3% between 2010/11 and 2014/15.

 The document claims that their has been an immediate £500 million injection into general practice as part of the The General Practice Forward View (GPFV) outlined funding growth of £2.4 billion per annum by 2021. On the back of an envelope I work that out as an extra £9 per patient and I have not seen that in Wakefield.

 The document talks about increasing medical student numbers by 1000 and offering increased places to medical schools that have a curriculum that is likely to make shortage specialities attractive to medical students (good) but they fail to acknowledge the demographic and work pattern shifts of young doctors so that you need more than 1000 doctors to get 1000 FTE because of part time working (bad).

 There is very little detail in the document about the wide primary care team apart from the establishment of Community Education Provider Networks (CEPN) to deliver multidisciplinary team training and support local recruitment. And we have one already in Wakefield - it is the Advanced Training Practice Hub.

 Overall the document:

  • Fails to acknowledge the huge work load rise in general practice
  • Fails to acknowledge the proper workforce crisis in general practice
  • Fails to suggest anything the will meaningful aid the recruitment, training and retention of a wider primary care team
  • Makes bold claims for funding in general practice that does not appear to be based on reality,

Overall I think this is a general practice workforce strategy in denial that there is a crisis affecting general practice.
Rant warning off|

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What does the latest workforce survey say about staffing in Wakefield?

Image
The latest quarterly survey of general practice staff in practices across Yorkshire and Humber was published last week. There were several themes from the data: The number of practices continues to reduce with mergers and consolidation of practices. In the last quarter the number of practices again reduced from 765 to 757 The affect of initiatives to encourage newly qualified nurses to have a career in general practice can be seen with 12% of GP nurses under 34 years of age The number of GPs under 34 has reduced from 23% to 20%. This might because newly qualified GPs are not taking up posts locally. It raises the interesting questions about where they actually are going? The report also shows the continued huge inter practice variation. Of 136 practices that commented about their risks and mitigation's only one practice said it had no workforce risks. The risks could be summarises under the following headings: Recruitment / retention /retirement Workload Resource co...
Read more

Is there a General Practice Workforce crisis in Wakefield?

Image
GP numbers nationally are falling. Below is a chart of wte GPs in England: As you can see they peaked in 2013 and have fallen since. However, Wakefield is bucking the trend in that our numbers of clinical staff have increased over the last three years. Practices have submitted data to a workforce survey over the last three years and it shows increasing numbers of all staff in general practices in Wakefield. Indeed Wakefield has the most GPs, GP Nurses and administration staff of any CCG in West Yorkshire! The data from the workforce survey is tabulated below: Workload in General Practice continues to increase. Below is a chart of the number of consultations by doctors and nurses in practices in Wakefield that use SystmOne. As you can see the total number of consultations has increased over the last five years. The number of consultations by GP's has reduced and those by GP nurses has increased. This is particularly relevant to the question of whether we are in a wo...
Read more

Today in Wakefield ....

Image
Today in Wakefield: Between 7,000 and 9,000 people will have an appointment with either their GP or Practice nurse 560 people will be seen in extra appointments funded by the CCG 340 people will visit the Emergency Department at Pinderfields or Pontefract Over the last five years there has been a small increase in the total number of consultations in general practice: As you can see from the graph the increase in consultations has been mainly nurse consultations with a reduction in GP consultations. This data comes from searching for appointments on GP practice computer systems across Wakefield. The data may or may not be 100% robust. It does not take into account practice list size growth, not all practices in Wakefield use SytemOne and not all practices will record and use appointments in the same way. There are 232 full time equivalent GPs and 150 full time equivalent GP Nurses in Wakefield. If today in Wakefield, one or two people can't get an appointment with th...
Read more