GP leaders are hoping to gain political support for investment in primary care after a hearing in front of MPs in which they told how growing pressures are leading to increasing abuse of staff.

Doctors rebutted allegations that they have reduced face to face appointments and spoke about the pressures on practice time during the hearing at the House of Commons Health Committee. One GP spoke of the increase in abuse against doctors and staff, triggered by allegations that they were reluctant to see patients

Speaking to the committee, Dr Kieran Sharrock, deputy chair of the British Medical Association GP committee for England, said: “One in five GPs has been the butt of abuse as a result of the recent campaign against general practice. Dialling down the rhetoric against general practice is really important if you want to retain and recruit GPs. We have to be honest with the public about what general practice is delivering now, not what it should be delivering – clearly a 10 or 20-year plan is needed for that, including a workforce plan – but at the moment we can’t provide the care to the level we want to. We need the Government to support us and say, ‘This is what your GP can do at the moment because of the rise in demand, the huge backlog and the loss of staff. That might actually make the profession feel supported. I have a member of my staff who burst into tears after having abuse from a patient and we have to have zero tolerance of that.”

He added: “The evidence is that actually GPs throughout the pandemic did, and currently are, seeing patients face-to-face – with 70% of our appointments being just that. And that’s with more patients on our books and less staff to see them. Over the past year, England alone has lost the equivalent of 279 full-time, fully qualified GPs.”

Royal College of GPs chair Professor Martin Marshall said GPs, in effect, have just two or three minutes to deal with each health issue. They are having to spend increasing amounts of time supporting patients on the six million strong waiting list, he said. He warned that 34% of GPs plan to retire over the next five years. He said: “That would be 14,000 fewer GPs than we have at the moment. So, we’re likely to be losing more GPs than we’re recruiting and that is a massive crisis.”

Recently retired GP Dr Andrew Green said: “We need to accept that 10-minute appointments are not safe. The only way that you can run a 10-minute appointment surgery on time is by cutting corners. Experience helps that process, but we are deluding ourselves if we think that we’re always safe. One of the things that made me finally give up normal clinical work was the feeling at the end of the day that I wasn’t happy with the work that I’d done because I couldn’t fit what the patients needed into the 10-minute appointments.”

Committee chair Jeremy Hunt concluded: “We’ve taken away some short-term solutions. I think though we also have heard loud and clear that unless we have a long-term plan to give hope that the capacity of the system will start to match the demands on GPs’ time, then in the end we’re not going to really give credible optimism for the future to the new generation of GPs, and that’s certainly something we want to think about as a committee.”