Thank you to all our patients for the support and understanding you have shown us after our message about the funding difficulties the surgery is facing. Many people have contacted their MP about this, and we thank you sincerely.
Please would you consider further supporting us and General Practice in general by signing our parliamentary petition?
Where the petition wording says ‘smaller practices’ it means that individual surgeries and the traditional local surgery led model of care are under threat. It is NOT just Winchcombe, but all standalone GP Surgeries in the country.
The background to this petition is that all the new funding the NHS/Government is putting into services is going to ‘primary care networks’, or ‘PCNs’. This means there is money for what they call ‘Additional Roles’ that groups of practices can employ as a ‘Network’: This includes pharmacists and social prescribers and other roles working, in our case, across five practices.
There is no extra money for individual practices, i.e. Winchcombe.
In fact, our funding is drastically deteriorating as we are given year after year of sub-inflationary funding uplifts. This year we were given a 2% funding uplift, but inflation is running at 3% + and minimum wage increases of nearly 10% are driving up costs.
For the past five years our funding has been uplifted by around 2% annually, when inflation has been as high as 10% and the cost of wages and utilities and general living costs have spiralled.
Although the additional roles staff are a very welcome extra resource, unfortunately this is coming at the opportunity cost of reduced funds going to our local practices. The effect of this is that we cannot offer the level of access and service we want to locally, here in Winchcombe. We cannot afford more staff to offer more appointments.
We are not under threat of closure at present and want to reassure people about this most clearly. However, we can’t weather a sub-inflation funding squeeze in the long term.
Something has to change in the next year or two.
If local funding does not increase it is likely that ultimately we will have to merge, most probably into a big network surgery centre which (while we can’t imagine the local surgery hub would close entirely) might mean you would have to travel a long way for some services and would have a lot less continuity of care and be less likely to see a GP for a lot of that care.
We believe the continuity of care that we currently have in Winchcombe where you have a named GP that you know and knows you, and what we aspire to deliver in Winchcombe surgery deserves to be fought for.
We don’t think the Public have been adequately consulted on these changes and indeed many will not be aware of them.
Please help support us in whatever ways you can and please consider signing the petition.