Newsletter: November 2024

First, the good news…

We are delighted to announce that Bourn Surgery has been awarded the Royal College of General Practitioners East Anglia Practice Team Aware 2024

This award is for the most outstanding contribution to Primary Care service provision or development by a Practice Team in the preceding year. We felt that after the challenges and successes of the last year our team deserved the recognition of being nominated for this award, and we are delighted to have won

Representatives from each of the Surgery’s teams attended the Awards ceremony at Bedford Lodge Hotel in Newmarket on 25th September, and were presented with a very impressive engraved glass trophy

We do hope you will agree that this award is hugely deserved by the whole Bourn Surgery team. We are very proud that the efforts of each member of our team has been recognised. 

…But our practice is under threat

We don’t want to get political, and recognise that balancing the country’s finances is an almost impossible task. Successive Governments have consistently underfunded General Practice, however it is hard to imagine a budget that could have been worse for General Practice

As avid readers of this newsletter will know from previous articles, general practices such as Bourn Surgery are independent small business, owned by the GP partners who are legally only able to hold one contract with one provider - the NHS - to provide NHS general practice services to their patients. Governments set our income, and over many years this has failed to meet our increasing costs and the increasing demands on our services. It is this scenario that has led to practice closures throughout the country, and has led to the increasing urgency of our professional leaders in trying to raise awareness of the fragility of general practice. The current value of the contract provides just 31 pence per day for each patient registered with us.

It is on this background that the increasing of both employer’s National Insurance (NI) contributions, and raising the National Living Wage will have a particular detrimental impact. As all small business owners will know, this will significantly increase our staff costs, at a time when general practices are already struggling to continue to provide services on the income they currently have. These changes will cause further GP practices to close and lead to other practices to reduce staff numbers and services in order to keep afloat. At Bourn Surgery we are now reassessing the levels of services we provide in light of these proposed changes. We do not want to reduce our staff or our services, but we may have no choice.

What seems even more extraordinary is that while public service NHS organisations such as hospital trusts will have their employer’s NI increase reimbursed, GP practices, along with hospices and charities that provide services on behalf of the NHS, have been deemed not to be public services, and therefore will receive no reimbursement. However, the Treasury has at the same time also declared that GP practices are public services, and therefore we have no access to the Employment Allowance that small businesses in the private sector do.

What can you do to help us?

Across the profession GPs, and our representative trade union the BMA, are writing to MPs and lobbying the Government to raise awareness of this situation. The more MPs hear about the concerns, the more they will understand the true consequences of the action the Government is taking. You can help by adding your voice; patients across the country will be directly impacted by the closure or reduction in services of their local GP practice, and we believe that many patients value the care they receive and do not want to lose it. Please consider writing to your MP to express your opinion. You can find your MP’s contact details here

Our local Integrated Care System’s vision of the future:

The worrying news continues more locally unfortunately. Our local ICS are planning to develop a New Model of care which will require all patients to access any NHS care through a “digital front door”, costing £10million of the NHS budget for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. What will this mean? Rather than going straight to A&E, or calling your local GP, patients will need to login to a “digital portal” and you’ll be told where to go. You won’t be able to just book a GP appointment or attend A&E, but will be required to use the digital portal. It will become more likely you’ll get access to NHS clinicians who aren’t doctors, or NHS staff using artificial intelligence to advise you about your health

As a practice we are extremely concerned about these potential changes. How will elderly patients or those with learning disabilities access this digital front door? How will patients who don’t have WiFi, smartphones, computer skills or good vision access this? How will patients feel about the loss of ability to contact their GP practice when they feel they need to? We don’t know the answers but we do know this feels like the end of a family doctor service on the NHS.

There is a Cambridgeshire & Peterborough NHS survey about your views on these plans for digital access - and even this survey can only be accessed by those who already have digital access! We would strongly advise everybody to complete this survey to give their views. Please also share this survey with your elderly relatives and neighbours, help them complete it and help them have their say. If you are concerned about the loss of access to your GP or walk-in access to A&E as you currently know it
please feedback how it would affect you and your family

You can complete the survey here

Christmas Opening Times

The festive season will soon be upon us, and we would like to remind everyone that the practice will be closed on the 25th and 26th December, and the 1st January

From 1pm to 6pm on the 24th December the dispensary will be closed and the practice will be open for emergencies only

Please remember to request ensure you have sufficient medication for the bank holiday closures and ensure you allow seven days between requesting your prescriptions and expecting to be able to collect them, and only attend the Dispensary when you have received a text message to say that it is ready.

Although we approach the end of the year at a challenging time for General Practice, please be assured that as a team we are committed to continuing to work hard and provide the best possible care we can for all of our patients.

We would like to take this opportunity to wish all of our patients a peaceful festive season and a healthy New Year.

Published: Nov 27, 2024