Tories pledge to boost GP numbers ahead of election

The Conservatives have said that they will deliver 6,000 more doctors in general practice in England by 2025 to increase patient appointments.

The party claim they will reach that target through additional doctors working and training in surgeries, international recruitment and better retention, even though a previous Conservative pledge, made by then Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, to recruit 5,000 GPs by 2020 has not been met.

Their new plan would see the current tally of 3,538 GPs in training every year rise by about 500 each year over the next four years.  They also claim that recruiting more GPs from overseas while improving efforts to retain current staff would lead to a total of 6,000 more doctors than there are now.

Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, commented: “You can’t trust the Tories with our NHS. They always make election promises which they fail to deliver on. Tory ministers promised us 5,000 extra GPs but in fact we have lost 1600 GPs under the Tories. After years of starving the NHS of cash, it’s got harder and harder to get a GP appointment under the Tories. Labour will invest more in family doctor services and train more GPs to deliver millions of extra appointments.”

Labour has said it wants to expand GP training places from 3,500 to 5,000 a year to ease the burden on GPs.

Helen Stokes-Lampard, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: "Waiting times for a GP appointment have become the national conversation - and GPs are as frustrated as our patients, especially when we are working flat out to try and keep up with rising demand at the same time as we have a severe shortage of GPs and practice staff.

"Crucially, patients cannot expect this to happen overnight as more appointments will only happen when other promises are delivered first, and as always the devil will be in the detail. There are over 300 million consultations – and rising – in England alone every year, and without the hard work and dedication of GPs and our teams, the rest of the NHS would collapse.

"We welcome the commitments to recruit more GPs and practice staff and retain existing GPs, especially the recognition that previous commitments for boosting our workforce have not focused sufficiently on retaining existing GPs. But we need urgent action – both funding and extra staff  - to support the GPs who are currently keeping general practice afloat, but are grappling with unmanageable workloads as we go above and beyond to do the best for our patients, often to the detriment of our own health and well-being."