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A poll of GP’s for the Guardian newspaper has found that NHS doctors don’t trust the health secretary Jeremy Hunt and are convinced that the coalition is determind to privatise large areas of the NHS.
The poll found that 83% of respondents agreed with the statement that “Jeremy Hunt is seeking to undermine public trust in GPs”, and 3% disagreed.
An even larger proportion (88%) rejected Hunt’s repeated claim that the contract agreed between Labour ministers and GPs in 2004 – which meant family doctors no longer had to provide out-of-hours care – was a key contributor to greater overcrowding in hospital A&E units.
The 1,008 GPs polled, selected to be representative of the UK’s 40,000 family doctors, were asked whether they agreed or disagreed that the health secretary was right to say that changes in the 2004 GP contract were a key contributor to the current load on emergency departments.
Just 4% said they agreed or strongly agreed, 25% disagreed and another 63% strongly disagreed. The British Medical Association (BMA), the doctors’ trade union, has said there is no evidence for Hunt’s claim.
A staggering 94% of participants said they agreed or strongly agreed that “GPs are being unfairly criticised for political purposes”.
An alliance of 10 NHS organisations recently called for an end to what it called unfair and sustained criticism of the service.
One GP who took part in the poll told Doctors.net.uk:
“I feel GPs are being used as political scapegoats, and the propaganda being voiced is to the detriment of patient care.”
Another said they were
“frustrated with the endless GP bashing”, and a third said: “The coalition is dripping poison into the media about the overload at A&Es with the intention of using this as a stick to beat GPs with.”
Dr Tim Ringrose, chief executive of Doctors.net.uk, said:
“Some commentators have described 2013 as an annus horribilis for the NHS. Our research suggests that this has certainly been the case for many GPs in terms of the way they feel they have been treated by the government.
“A lot of the rhetoric around NHS services has been unnecessarily adversarial towards GPs. This has caused great distress to GPs who have embraced the new clinical commissioning environment and are continuing to work hard to deliver the highest standards of care to their patients.”
Dr Mark Porter, chair of the BMA’s ruling council, said:
“All politicians must stop using the NHS as a political football. There is currently a damaging climate where NHS staff in particular are used for partisan point-scoring rather than as partners in a joint effort to address the real workload and financial crisis undermining the health service.”
GPs are undertaking 340m consultations a year, 40m more than in 2010. Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the BMA’s GPs committee, said the failure to fund general practice to respond to that increase had left all surgeries struggling to cope.
In the survey, 71% of participants said they believed that cradle-to-grave NHS care regardless of ability to pay was likely to disappear in England in the forseeable future, and 74% said they feared that the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition “has an ultimate agenda to tender provision of GP services to large private providers in England”.
The Haze says
The doctors tell us what we have long feared – that this coalition government is busy dismantling and attacking the NHS in as many ways as it can.
The British public will not easily forgive this betrayal of trust and British values. But everyone who cares about the NHS needs to stand up tall to protect it from people who see only the eye-watering profits that will flow from cherry picking areas of the NHS they think ripe for privatisation.
Bit of a pointless headline, according to the polls not that many people trust the present coalition government never mind just doctors. On this point though is it about contracts and the NHS or is it because the politicians seem to like the idea of training clinician nurses to do particular operations and run various clinics instead of doctors?