Urgent support needed for GPs to manage second wave

The British Medical Association is warning that general practice will not be able to cope with a second wave of coronavirus unless urgent measures are put in place to support family doctors and their teams.

Practices in England are telling the BMA that they do not have the capacity to carry out all of the work required of them while managing the ongoing care of patients, reconfiguring services and dealing with the backlog of care put on hold during the first wave of the pandemic.

The BMA’s GP England committee is therefore proposing a series of measures to support practices so that they are able to deliver care to patients and protect their staff during a second wave this autumn and winter.

The measures include: support for the general practice workforce, including occupational health services for all staff, and practices to be supplied PPE free of charge; ensuring practices receive all the resources they need by expanding the Covid Support Fund and extending it until March 2021; provision of equipment to facilitate home working and working in different settings; and funding for structural changes to surgery buildings to allow for enhanced social distancing and infection control to protect both patients and the workforce.

Dr Richard Vautrey, BMA GP committee England chair, said: “During the height of the pandemic earlier in the year GPs and their teams worked incredibly hard and through innovation rapidly reconfigured their ways of working to ensure that they could continue to serve their communities safely, while prioritising care for those who needed it most.

“With the UK recording a record number of daily Covid cases yesterday, GPs, like all doctors, are extremely concerned that without decisive action now services will be overwhelmed if we see another spike in the coming weeks and months. This means giving practices and the profession all they need – whether that’s an occupational health service similar to that already freely available to hospital workers so that staff get the vital risk assessments needed to protect them, or funding to extend surgery buildings to ensure social distancing and infection control measures are maintained, keeping patients and staff safe.

“The measures we’ve outlined are aimed at supporting practices and their staff to deliver high quality care while managing the increased pressures of doing so during a pandemic, and it is vital that the government and NHS England listens and implements these urgently to ensure that primary care can continue to operate safely through what looks to be an incredibly difficult winter.”