The public recognise that doctor shortages are the key problem in general practice, campaigners say today.

A new campaign seeks to turn public opinion following controversy over claims that patients cannot get face to face appointments. The British Medical Association is using the slogan “Support Your Surgery” for the campaign. A major petition calls on the government to support improvements to buildings and recruit more GPs.

The BMA released the findings of a major public survey showing that 58% of the public support continued infection control measures, such as limiting face to face appointments. 60% of respondents blamed the government and NHS management for the backlog of care and limits on access. Some 1,732 people took part in the survey conducted by pollsters BritainThinks. It found that 44% of people said increasing doctor numbers was the single most important step to improving general practice. The second most named item was increasing phone lines – named by 14%.

BMA GP committee chair Dr Richard Vautrey said: “We, like the rest of the NHS, were ill-prepared for the pandemic – with decades of underfunding and seriously short on staff, and the consequences of the last 18 months have added significantly to these pressures. They have also been understandably very stressful for patients and, sadly, this has resulted in poor behaviours, or worse, with some staff reporting cases of abuse and violence from patients.

“This isn’t the way we want it to be. GPs and their teams are just as frustrated, and while the general practice workforce have done everything in their power to improve pressures in their own surgeries, we can’t make the changes we and our patients want to see without urgent Government backing and funding. We hope this campaign, with GPs and patients working together, is the beginning of not only giving general practice what it needs, but also what our patients rightfully deserve.”

The Royal College of GPs, meanwhile, raised concerns about reports of abuse towards GPs and their staff. College chair Professor Martin Marshall said: “The vast majority of patients appreciate that GPs and our teams right across the country are doing the best we can and treat our staff with respect, but we understand their frustrations when they can’t get a GP appointment or face long waiting times to get through to the surgery. However, it’s a misconception that GPs aren’t seeing patients face to face. General practice has been open throughout the pandemic and face to face appointments have been offered wherever safe and appropriate.”

He added: “The real issue is that we have a huge shortage of GPs and our workforce is not big enough to manage the needs of an ageing and growing patient population with increasingly complex needs. This was the case before the pandemic and it has only been further exacerbated by the events of the past year.”

An NHS England spokesperson said: “Record numbers of people are now training to become GPs, with up to 4,000 people expected to start this year. The NHS has also introduced financial incentives for those who complete their training in more deprived parts of the country as well as investing in a number of schemes to retain and recruit over 6,000 GPs and over 26,000 to the wider general practice workforce.”