RCGP welcomes Scottish Conservatives GP funding call

Doctor - PA

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) in Scotland has welcomed a call by the Scottish Conservatives to increase the proportion of NHS spend which goes to family doctors.

Yesterday Tory leader Ruth Davidson visited a GP's surgery in Edinburgh to announce the policy, which would see 10 per cent of the NHS budget going to general practice by 2020.

It is something the professional body has campaigned for for years, as family doctors currently get around seven per cent of the budget, despite representing around 90 per cent of patient contact with health services. 

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 Davidson said funding would be needed to recruit and train GPs to replace those retiring, and to ease pressure on existing practices.

"GP surgeries in all parts of the country are just swamped under the weight and they cannot cope," she said.

"Doctors are telling us they cannot cope, patients are telling us they can't get on a list and they can't get an appointment. Something has got to give, so we have got to get a really strategic look at how we support this."

Chair of the RCGP in Scotland, Dr Miles Mack, said: "RCGP Scotland has been calling for such an approach for almost three years. We have been advocating for the decade’s worth of cuts to the percentage share of NHS Scotland budget that general practice receives to be reversed, through incremental increases, until it reaches 11% of the budget.

"As the First Minister said of the current provision, on 28 April, ‘we’ve got to increase that percentage.’"

Health Secretary Shona Robison said the Scottish Government were already providing 100 more GP training places and attempting to attract former GPs back to the profession. 

"While Scotland continues to have the highest number of GPs per patient in the UK, we are working to transform primary care and GP services, and have already committed to giving primary care an increasing share of NHS budget in each year of this parliament," she said.