Four in five GPs think patients are at risk

A new survey has found that over 80 per cent of GPs believe that patients are being put at risk when they come into their surgery for an appointment.

A poll of 1,395 GPs found that 85 per cent expressed concerns about patient safety, with two per cent saying that patients were ‘rarely’ safe, and 70 per cent believing that the risk to patient safety was increasing in their surgery.

Doctors identified lack of time with patients, workforce shortages, relentless workloads and heavy administrative burdens as the main reasons people receiving care could be exposed to risk.

The survey also found that as many as 91 per cent believe that more GPs would help improve the state of general practices and more than 80 per cent have had anxiety, stress or depression over the past year linked to their job.

Kieran Sharrock, deputy chair of the British Medical Association’s GP committee, said: “The evidence shows that, after you’ve already made 25 to 35 decisions about patients’ health on a particular day, that as a GP the risk of making a bad decision goes up. That could be prescribing an ineffective medicine for a patient, or making a referral to hospital for them when it’s not needed or, worse than that, not making a referral when it is needed. For example, we miss a red flag sign of cancer because we are overloaded already with decisions.”

Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is amongst a number of leading figures backing a new ‘Rebuild General Practice’ campaign, which is calling for urgent action to improve GP services.

He said: “The workforce crisis is the biggest issue facing the NHS. We can forget fixing the backlog unless we urgently come up with a plan to train enough doctors for the future and, crucially, retain the ones we’ve got.”