Helen Salisbury: GPs are unhappy about new neighbourhood plans

Abstract

A month since the NHS 10 year plan was published,1 many GPs are confused about what comes next. Oddly, for a plan all about neighbourhoods, it contains remarkably little about how and where general practice fits into this future NHS. While the word “genomics” appears 119 times in the document, the phrase “GP partnership” appears just twice. This has led many GPs to conclude that traditional structures—particularly our status as independent contractors to the NHS, with the autonomy that this brings—are not part of the plan. Stephen Kinnock, the government minister responsible for primary care, tried to reassure GPs at a recent BMA meeting that their contracts weren’t under threat. But he failed to convince, perhaps because that’s certainly not how the plan …