M Word - Special Edition - GP Resilience - Take Control campaign launched

"More than 1/4 million patients will be seen by you and the rest of General Practice in the capital today." 

“More than 90% of NHS contacts are in General Practice. Not hospitals. Not A&E.”

We used to take immense pride in facts like these, but it is now just so hard when we know that so many factors are getting in the way of providing the care and time we would wish for our patients and for ourselves. Getting in the way of us doing the job we are trained to do. 

• The ever-increasing demand for our services from all directions putting pressure at our ‘front doors’.

• The systematic financial hits on practices along with the lack of funds to increase our workforce all putting overwhelming strain on our practice systems and teams.

• Bureaucracy – both non-clinical and clinical, taking essential clinical and non-clinical staff time away from our purpose - providing care for the patient in front of us.

• Hospital systems and other behaviours creating workload for us and inconvenience for patients.

• Lack of adequate support services in the community - direct access to the fullest range of diagnostics and speedy results, phlebotomy, district nurses, health visitors, mental health workers, social services - causing an outflow stenosis, if not a blockage, in the routes to the care we know our patients need, resulting in backflow in our surgeries.

Think of the practice as a prostate – a strange analogy for some perhaps. All the above contribute to serious inflow and outflow obstruction squeezing the time we can make available for consultations with individual patients, the time we can make for our practices, ourselves and our families. In essence they all add up to serious exhaustion for us with the inevitable systems and morale and confidence crashes we and our patients are all experiencing daily. 

Well, it is now time for each of us to actively TAKE CONTROL of our work and our lives. It is time to rebuild our confidence and our resilience so that we can secure a future for our practices to do the job we as professionals are trained to do, and which all the evidence shows, is what the patients ‘in front of us’ want.

We need to understand that in this real world of a politically controlled NHS and extreme government financial squeezes, nobody else is going to do it for us.

So as individual providers and performers of General Practice, we must now each play our own part to create 'facts on the ground' in our own practices.

To help you keep this all in one place we have also launched a website purely dedicated to this campaign.

On the website you will find all of our ‘Securing the Future of General Practice’ guides and links to our GP Resilience Guides and patient-facing posters and materials as they are released.

This campaign will be interactive – we want to know what else you need which both reflects your situation, but crucially and especially at this time, builds lasting support from your own practice patients.

Please tell all your practice team members about this campaign, and direct them to our dedicated website www.gpresilience.org.uk which can also be accessed via our main website www.lmc.org.uk. Please also help us keep up to date with all GPs’, Nurses and Manager’s email and other contact details by letting us know of any changes by emailing gpresilience@lmc.org.uk.

Another key part of this campaign will be our “Survive to Thrive” conference, open to all GPs, Nurses and Practice Managers in central London on Thursday 5 February 2015. Please put this date in your diary as the event will be essential for you to attend. More information will be available shortly.

Earlier in this message I said that as far as building GP Resilience and Taking Control is concerned, nobody is going to do it for us. It is time for us all to play our part, to rebuild our own confidence and to re-empower ourselves at individual and practice level. We are not commissioners – we are providers of expert general practice to our registered list of patients.

We owe it to them and to ourselves to TAKE CONTROL of our professional and working lives, and we will do it.

Won’t we.....

My team and I at Londonwide LMCs are here to support you throughout these difficult times so please keep in touch. If you have any concerns, thoughts or ideas please let us know by either emailing gpresilience@lmc.org.uk or visiting our campaign website www.gpresilience.org.uk.