GPs are not to blame for A&E attendances (Huge rise in number of people in England’s A&Es for coughs or hiccups, 31 December).
England’s general practice meets unsustainable pressures with record productivity: 250,000 additional GP practice appointments are being delivered a day compared with 2019. It is the fall in the number of inpatient beds gumming up the A&E system, not a fall in GPs’ capacity to treat patients.
With that said, we have thousands of GPs looking for NHS work across England right now. Just 65 more GPs could have delivered the 1.9m appointments for people seeking help for headaches that the article mentions who went instead to A&E over the last five years.
We are still 750 GPs short of where we stood a decade ago, with GPs receiving only 34p per patient per day. The government is keen to progress its “neighbourhood” model, but without more GPs and more funding for them, patients won’t see any meaningful change.
Dr Katie Bramall
Chair, general practice committee in England, British Medical Association
It is time the public stopped blaming the government, lack of funding or the medical staff and took a long hard look in the mirror. How have we become a society that cannot look after itself or have the common sense to understand what hospitals are for? Even attending a GP for some of the minor complaints mentioned is not necessary.
As someone born in 1948 and brought up by parents who had had no access to medical care, I wonder why we have become so inadequate that we seem unable to take responsibility for our health. I’ve worked in the NHS all my working life and despair at how everyone is to blame except the two million unnecessary attendances and the huge number of GP appointments booked but not attended.
Jennifer Redshaw
St Neots, Cambridgeshire
