GPs are facing great challenges in providing continuity of care, according to the Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Professor Martin Marshall.

In a keynote address to the RCGP Annual Conference today, Professor Marshall will highlight the effects of intense workload and workforce pressures facing GPs and their staff. The conference is held in partnership with the World Organisation of Family Doctors Europe and attended by primary healthcare professionals from 80 countries.

It follows a survey published this week which showed that 42% of GPs say they are planning to leave the workforce in the next five years, the equivalent of about 19,000 people. In the survey, 68% of GPs said they do not have enough time to properly assess their patients and they fear this will lead to mistakes in diagnosis and prescribing.

Professor Marshall explains that relationship-based care needs to be made ‘more explicit and less mysterious’ for policy makers and system leaders. He will say: “Politicians may never understand our passionate commitment to continuity but they will understand the hard-headed language of value – better outcomes at lower cost, which is what good continuity has been shown to deliver.”

For example, his own experience as a GP showed “how mutual trust makes it easier to avoid prescribing unnecessary antibiotics, easier to avoid requesting a clinically unnecessary MRI scan for headaches, easier to manage pressure from a patient for a dermatology referral for a simple skin rash. Patients really benefit from the simple fact that their family doctor has got to know them over time and has built mutual trust, and this is supported by a body of research evidence conducted over many decades in many different countries.”

The RCGP today published its investigation into the issue – Relationship-based care: fit for the future – on strengthening relationships within modern general practice.