This winter the NHS are to recruit more than 1,000 GP assistants with the aim of enabling GPs more time to treat patients.
The idea is that these GP assistants will carry out administrative tasks and basic health checks usually performed by GPs. They will be trained in the role to take bloods, measure patients’ heart rates and blood pressure. They could be tasked with taking a brief medical history before patients are seen by the GP.
It is estimated that GP assistants can reduce the time doctors spend on correspondence by up to 85%.
Health Secretary, Therese Coffey, has claimed that up to one million extra GP appointments will be created every year. Along with GP assistants, she wants surgeries to take on more nurse practitioners to help alleviate doctors’ workloads.
Dr Richard Van Mellaerts, of the British Medical Association (BMA) however has called for the Government and NHS to be "honest" with the public that "such announcements are unlikely to free up GPs in the immediate short-term future, and certainly not this winter." He added: “The GP assistant is primarily an administrative role and while this has the potential to tackle some administrative burden it will not, on its own, make up for the severe shortage of doctors and other clinical staff who care for patients."
Certainly at my local GP practice, patients have been ‘up in arms’ for some time over the high number of locum GPs and extremely lengthy hold times at 8am of a morning when they have tried to make an appointment to see the GP, usually only to be told that there are no appointments left and to try again the following day (when they are met with the same scenario, it becoming a vicious circle.)
Something clearly needs to be done to make it easier for patients to get a GP appointment. Whilst this appears to be a step in the right direction, only time will tell whether it will make any actual difference.
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