Opposition grows to Government plans to close local GPs in Harrow

Impersonal polyclinics will mean further to travel to local doctor

Local people across Harrow face having to travel three times as far to visit their local doctor,Bob Blackman, prospective parliamentary candidate for Harrow East, warned this week. This has emerged from a detailed analysis of Government plans to introduce ‘polyclinics’ across England whether local residents want them or not.

Labour Ministers want to replace local GPs’ surgeries with impersonal super-surgeries. 1,700 family doctor surgeries could be closed down across England. 90 per cent of NHS care is administered by GPs.

·         London is being used as the test bed for these severe GP cuts. Currently, the average local GP in London is under half a mile away - but the Government has admitted that this will more than treble to 1.5 miles once its planned 150 polyclinics are introduced.

·         If the same approach was replicated across the country, the average family doctor could be more than three miles away. In Harrow, GP surgeries are currently an average of 0.5miles away. Under Labour plans, this could increase to 1.6miles. The elderly, infirm and young families will suffer the most from these increased journey times.

Bob Blackman remarked,

“I am very concerned that Labour’s planned cuts to GP services will mean local residents will have to travel further to see their local doctor when they are ill. These polyclinics will also be impersonal, breaking the valued link between patients and their family doctor.

“This latest round of cuts comes on top of plans to close down local Post Offices. Gordon Brown doesn’t seem to care about the social value of keeping services local.”

Notes to Editors

Labour’s plans to scrap local GP surgeries

In June 2007, Gordon Brown personally appointed Professor Sir Ara Darzi as Health Minster in his new government, giving him a peerage to allow him to perform his duties. Darzi had just completed a review of the NHS in London, in which he strongly pushed his vision for ‘polyclinics’. Since his appointment as Health Minister, Lord Darzi has continued to drive forward the polyclinics programme across the country.

·         1,700 local family doctor surgeries under threat.  Conservative Party analysis shows that if Labour’s plans to concentrate GP services in polyclinics are delivered then one in five local GP surgeries in England would be likely to close – 1,091 surgeries in London and 609 in the rest of England.  Polyclinics are likely to come at the expense of existing GP practices.

·         King's Fund chief executive Niall Dickson said: “A major centralisation of GP services into polyclinics would make it more difficult for patients to visit their GP. This would be a major sacrifice given that primary care visits account for 90 per cent of all patient contact with the NHS” (Daily Mail, 5 June 2008).

·         There is no new money for polyclinics. The NHS Operating Framework explicitly states that there is no additional funding for polyclinics and that the £250 million fund provided by Alan Johnson is only for extra GP surgeries in the 38 Primary Care Trusts with the poorest provision of GP services. PCTs are already overstretched, without having to build a new polyclinic and fund more GP salaries as well.

·         Darzi has said family doctors should be pushed into polyclinics.   In his review of the NHS in London, Darzi suggested that Primary Care Trusts would need to use contractual arrangements to push GPs into polyclinics.  He said: “Aside from polyclinics created from the bottom-up by enthusiastic GPs, considerable thought is needed on how to encourage GPs to use them. Primary care contracting needs to be considered as a tool for recruiting GPs to be based in polyclinics. Issues around the ownership of existing premises also need to be resolved if there is to be a large-scale move of GPs into polyclinics” (Healthcare for London, A Framework for Action, July 2007, p.126).

·         The number of individual GP surgeries in England is already decreasing.  The number of GPs per practice has increased by 29 per cent since 1997, while the number of individual surgeries has decreased by 9 per cent (NHS Information Centre, 14 March 2008).

LOCAL ANALYSIS

Under Labour plans to concentrate GPs in large “polyclinics”, patients would have to walk half an hour (1.5 miles) to get to a GP. The NHS London consultation said: “We recognise that you may be concerned about having to travel further to see a GP... High-level modelling suggests that... most Londoners would be within 1.5 miles of a polyclinic” (p.42). This is 3.33 times further than is currently the case.

The table below shows the current average distance people in each region live from their nearest GP according to Government estimates. It then calculates the effect that polyclinics could have on this distance if the same scenario occurs as in London and distance to the nearest GP practice is increased 3.33 times.

Average road distance to GP premises and polyclinics

GP data source: DCLG, Index of Deprivation 2007, obtained by House of Commons Library.