Collective Action
What is Collective Action
We, along with all other General Practices have been taking on additional work for hospitals in recent years. This work takes time and resource, which takes us away from managing our primary services for you. Therefore, all General Practices have voted overwhelming to start ‘collective action’. This is an identification and general push back of the work which has been creeping into primary care.
Why Collective Action is needed:
We are concerned about three main areas:
- Patient Safety: The numbers of patient consultations we complete in a day means that we are not practising as safely as we would like
- Workforce: The huge workload is making it difficult to recruit and retain staff, and levels of burnout are high
- Funding: We are not being funded sufficiently to recruit more staff for the demand we are facing
Collective Action draws attention to these problems so we can offer you the best possible care in the long run.
What this means for you:
The practice will be open as normal. But you may see changes around appointments and services:
- We will return work to other healthcare providers (Hospitals) where they should have completed that part of care. This includes referrals, fit notes, starting prescriptions, investigations, and responding to patient queries.
- We will not take over prescribing medications that were started by specialists, unless there is funding for this work.
- We will not provide monitoring checks for certain conditions, where this should be done by your hospital/specialist team.
- We will work towards clinicians having a safe workload. This means they will not see more patients than they can cope with. There will probably be longer waits for routine appointments. If you need urgent care, you may be directed to an urgent treatment centre or a pharmacy, depending on what is wrong.
We are sorry for the inconvenience this may cause and ask for your understanding and patience. We are taking every possible step to minimise disruption to your care.
We hope this action will bring meaningful changes, which benefit our patients and the healthcare system.
Thank you for your support, patience, and understanding during this challenging time. Please be kind to our staff. They want to help you get the care you need and will do everything they can to do that.