Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has formally backed his shadow health secretary in plans to reform and effectively nationalise GP services. Wes Streeting’s proposals to make general practitioners salaried NHS employees have been criticised in some quarters of the medical profession.
But Sir Keir, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, said: “If we don’t get real about reform, the NHS will die”. The pledges have echoes of New Labour’s 1997 promises, when Tony Blair swept into power on the back of a manifesto vowing to slash NHS waiting times and focus the NHS more on patients.
Sir Keir used his article to outline reforms a future Labour government would introduce, including getting rid of “bureaucratic nonsense”, allowing patients to bypass GPs and refer themselves to specialists. He also backed phasing in a new system for GPs, turning family doctors into direct NHS employees.
The current model sees self-employed GPs run their own practices under contracts awarded by the NHS. The Opposition leader said it was time to accept the system needed overhauling, with the pressure on doctors' surgeries causing more people to go straight to hospital instead.
Sir Keir suggested young doctors were not keen on taking on the “burdens and liabilities” of the current system as older GPs left the workforce. “As GPs retire and those contracts are handed back, I want to phase in a new system that sees GPs fairly rewarded within the NHS, working much more closely with other parts of the system,” he said. "Not everyone will want to hear this – but it is the direction we need to go in.”
The comments chimed with arguments made by Mr Streeting on the need for NHS reform. He told the BBC last week that the “front door to the NHS is broken”, declaring “more than two million people waited more than a month back in October to see a GP”. He said that “increasingly, people coming into general practice now prefer to be salaried” and that by 2026, they will be the majority.
Labour’s proposals come against a backdrop of winter pressures on the NHS and industrial action by nurses and ambulance workers. Last week, figures showed the proportion of patients seen within four hours in England’s A&Es fell to a record low of 65 per cent in December.
Sir Keir also said Labour would look to free up medical professional time by removing “mundane inconveniences and inefficiencies” that end up “resulting in a mind-boggling waste of time”. Such improvements, he suggested, should include those with back problems being able to self-refer to physios — a policy currently being piloted by some trusts.
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