NHS Proposals 'From Cloud Nine'

NHS Proposals 'From Cloud Nine'

Pledges from the Government to expand NHS services have "barely the detail to fill a post-it note", the head of the doctors' union has said.

Dr Mark Porter called on ministers to "get real" as he described the Government as being run from "from cloud nine rather than Number 10".

Dr Porter, the British Medical Association's (BMA) council chair, was speaking as he made the keynote speech at its annual representative meeting in Liverpool, where he said recent promises regarding a "new deal for GPs" are nothing more than "old, repackaged ideas distracting from the central issues".

The crisis currently facing the NHS is real, he said, "but their solutions show little grasp of reality".

He told delegates that during the general election campaign and since the Tories were elected "we've been promised a massive expansion of NHS services".

But he said little detail has been given about how this will actually be carried out.

He also told delegates that measures outlined by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt on Friday will not solve the problem of a mass shortage of GPs at the same time as the Tories strive to make the NHS a truly seven-days-a-week service.

"They talk about GPs doing even more, when thousands already work in out-of-hours services, propping up the NHS," he said.

Referring to how the Government has promised 5,000 new GPs by 2020, he asked: "How will these new GPs be ready to start work in five years' time when it takes 10 years to train a GP?"

"How are they even going to recruit more GP trainees when hundreds of existing training posts are still unfilled?"

"When will they provide substance over rhetoric and recycled ideas, to focus on the detail of how they will support GPs already burnt-out from overwork, in a service where more than 10,000 GPs are predicted to leave in the next five years?"

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