Dangerous shortage of medics threatens safe patient care in England, top GP says | GPs

GPs can no longer provide safe care to millions of patients due to a dangerous shortage of doctors, Britain’s top family doctor has said.

Professor Kamila Hawthorne, president of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), said surgical practices were desperate to hire more doctors to meet growing demand for care, but could not afford to do so due to a lack of core funding.

Exhausted family doctors are working “completely unsafe hours” because their practices don’t have the cash flow to hire new staff or replace those who quit, increasing the risk of serious errors or missed life-threatening situations, she said.

“GPs will always strive to do what is best for our patients, but we cannot continue like this,” Hawthorne said. “GP workload pressures are so pronounced that many of our members tell us they fear they will not be able to guarantee safe care when there are not enough GPs to keep up.

She said decades of chronic underfunding had left general practice on the brink, with fewer family doctors, unable to cope with record demand and an aging population with increasingly complex conditions. The result was an “unsustainable workload” and “compromised” patient safety.

She sounded the alarm in an interview with the Guardian as more than 8,000 GPs signed a letter to Health Secretary Wes Streeting urging him to take action to train, recruit and retain more doctors and restore patient safety.

In England, a full-time, fully qualified GP is now responsible for 2,241 patients on average, an increase of 304 patients each (16%) in 10 years, Hawthorne said.

She said: “The number of patients per GP is increasing, while our clinical work has become more complex with our aging population. We don’t have the workforce to manage this safely or provide the continuity of care that we know benefits patients.”

An RCGP survey of GP practice managers found 61% needed to hire at least one more GP in the next 12 months to cope with patient demand. However, 92% said a lack of core funding prevented them from doing so.

A practice manager, who asked not to be named, said: “Without additional funding there is nothing we can do to resolve the situation. In our area the problem used to be [be a] lack of people; now we have people available and no money to recruit.

In the 12 months to September 2025, a record 386 million consultations were provided in England alone, the equivalent of more than a million a day and 86 million more than the total for 2019. Yet many patients still face an uphill battle to secure an appointment.

Hawthorne said: “We know how frustrating it can be for our patients when they struggle to see their GP. It’s also frustrating for us when we know patients are struggling to access our services.

“The reality is that GPs and our teams are booking more appointments than ever, but we are struggling to keep up as patient numbers increase, the care they need becomes more complex and practices are hamstrung by a lack of funding to hire the GPs they need.

Hawthorne’s intervention came amid a serious argument between the doctors and Streeting. The Guardian reported last week that hospital consultants were preparing to join resident doctors in striking over excessive pay.

At the England Local Medical Committee conference earlier this month, grassroots GPs passed a motion asking doctors to refuse to comply with new online access requirements for surgical procedures.

Since October 1, GP practices in England have been required to keep their online consultation platform open throughout their working hours for non-urgent appointment requests, medication requests and administrative requests.

The motion condemned the changes as “a cynical political stunt that is unfunded, dangerous and knowingly unworkable in the context of the current workforce collapse”.

In the letter addressed to Streeting and signed by the GPs, Hawthorne wrote: “We cannot continue to expect general practice to provide timely and safe care to patients if we simply cannot afford to do so.

“We know that when it comes to the NHS, access to GPs is the top priority for patients… The growing concern over access to GPs is no surprise given that practices across the country cannot afford to hire enough GPs to meet demand.”

The Department of Health and Social Care said it was “grateful” to GPs for their “crucial work”, adding: “We have placed them at the heart of our 10-year health plan and our neighborhood health services. »

A spokesperson said it had recruited 2,500 GPs, scrapped half of GP targets to cut red tape and provided £1.1bn of extra funding.

However, Hawthorne said the additional funding had been blunted by the government’s decision to increase national insurance contributions. The RCGP survey found that 83% of practice leaders cited the increase in NICs as a key factor in being unable to hire doctors.

She said: “We need more GPs – thousands more – but practices also need to be properly funded to hire them. We need the Government to provide real detail – including figures – in the 10-year workforce plan, of how we will get the promised thousands of extra GPs to the frontline, providing care to patients.”

“A plan without numbers is no plan at all, and while the government has made a number of promising commitments, we need a clear roadmap out of this crisis. »