The chair of the RCGP has warned that there is a ‘real threat’ that general practice will face the same fate as dentistry in the UK – where a growing number of practitioners have gone private.
Professor Martin Marshall made the comments during his keynote address at Pulse’s flagship conference, held on Monday and Tuesday this week in London.
He said that general practice being at ‘breaking point’ is ‘probably a metaphor’, but that there is a ‘very significant and very real threat’ that it could become more like UK dentistry or ‘the very worst of the US healthcare system’. He told GPs: ‘Some practices really have struggled [and] fallen over, [but] I don’t think the model of general practice is going to disappear completely, I don’t think it’s going to break. But what I do think is if we continue under the current pressure that we’re under, general practice is going to become a more and more difficult job to do and a more and more difficult job to do well.’
Full story in Pulse, 25 April 2022
