Dangerous shortage of medics threatens safe patient care in England, top GP says
GPs can no longer guarantee safe care for millions of patients because of a dangerous shortage of medics, Britain’s top family doctor has said.Prof Kamila Hawthorne, the chair of the Royal College of GPs (RCGP), said surgeries were desperate to hire more doctors to meet soaring demand for care but could not afford to do so because of a lack of core funding.Exhausted family doctors have been working “completely unsafe hours” because their surgeries did not have the cash to recruit new staff or replace those quitting, increasing the risk of serious errors or deadly conditions being missed, she said.“GPs will always push themselves to do what’s best for our patients, but we can’t go on like this,” Hawthorne said.“GP workload pressures are so pronounced that many of our members are telling us they are worried they can’t guarantee safe care when there aren’t enough GPs to keep up.
”She said decades of chronic underfunding had left general practice on the brink, with fewer family doctors, unable to cope with record demand and an ageing population with increasingly complex conditions.The result was “unsustainable workloads” and “compromised” patient safety.She raised the alarm in an interview with the Guardian as more than 8,000 GPs signed a letter to the health secretary, Wes Streeting, urging him to take action to train, recruit and retain more doctors and restore patient safety.A fully qualified full-time GP in England is now responsible for 2,241 patients on average, a rise of 304 patients each (16%) in 10 years, Hawthorne said.She said: “The number of patients per GP is rising higher and higher, while our clinical work has become more complex with our ageing population.
We don’t have the workforce to manage this safely or give the continuity of care that we know benefits patients.”A RCGP survey of GP practice managers found 61% needed to hire at least another GP in the next 12 months to cope with patient demand.However, 92% of those said a lack of core funding was preventing them from doing so.One practice manager, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “Without additional funding, there is nothing we can do to resolve the situation.In our area the issue used to [be a] lack of people; now we have people available and no money to recruit with.
”In the 12 months to September 2025, a record 386m consultations were delivered in England alone – the equivalent of more than a million a day and 86m more than the total in 2019.Yet many patients still face an uphill battle to get an appointment.Hawthorne said: “We know how frustrating it can be for our patients when they struggle to see their GP.It’s also frustrating for us when we know patients are struggling to access our services.“The reality is GPs and our teams are delivering more appointments than ever, but we’re struggling to keep up as patient numbers grow, the care they need becomes more complex, and practices are hamstrung by a lack of funding to hire the GPs they need.
”Sign up to First EditionOur morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it mattersafter newsletter promotionHawthorne’s intervention comes amid a serious row between doctors and Streeting.The Guardian reported last week that hospital consultants were gearing up to join resident doctors in striking over pay.At the England local medical committee conference earlier this month, grassroots GPs passed a motion for medics to refuse to comply with new online access requirements for surgeries.From 1 October, GP surgeries in England have been required to keep their online consultation platform open for the duration of their working hours for non-urgent appointment requests, medication queries and admin requests.The motion condemned the changes as “a cynical political stunt that is unfunded, unsafe and knowingly undeliverable in the context of current workforce collapse”.
In the letter to Streeting signed by GPs, Hawthorne wrote: “We cannot keep expecting general practice to provide timely, safe care for patients if we simply do not have the means to do so.“We know that when it comes to the NHS, access to GPs is the top priority for patients … Growing concern around GP access comes as no surprise given practices around the country cannot afford to hire enough GPs to keep up with demand.”The Department of Health and Social Care said it was “grateful” to GPs for their “crucial work”, adding: “We have placed them at the heart of our 10-year health plan and our neighbourhood health services.”A spokesperson said it had recruited 2,500 GPs, scrapped half of GP targets in order to reduce red tape and provided an extra £1.1bn in funding.
However, Hawthorne said the extra funding had been blunted by the government’s decision to increase national insurance contributions,The RCGP survey found 83% of practice managers cited the rise in NICs as a driving factor in being unable to hire doctors,She said: “We need more GPs – thousands more – but practices also need to be funded properly to hire them,We need the government to provide real detail – including numbers – in the 10-year workforce plan, on how we are to get the promised thousands more GPs on the frontline, delivering patient care,“A plan without numbers isn’t a plan at all, and while the government has made a number of promising commitments, we need a clear roadmap out of this crisis.
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Nigel Farage urged to root out Reform links to Russia after jailing of Nathan Gill
Nigel Farage is facing calls to investigate and root out links between Reform UK and Russia after one of his party’s former senior politicians was jailed for 10 years for accepting bribes from a pro-Kremlin agent.Keir Starmer said Farage had questions to answer about how this happened in his party. Nathan Gill, a former leader of Reform UK in Wales, admitted taking payments to make statements in favour of Russia.The sentencing came at the end of a damaging week for Farage in which the Guardian revealed accusations that he engaged in racist chants and comments while at school more than 40 years ago, which he denies.Reform UK remains about 10 points ahead in opinion polls, but Labour believes the party is vulnerable to criticism that Farage and his allies have been too pro-Russia, with the Gill case proving that a paid pro-Kremlin propagandist was allowed to rise to become a senior leader
Starmer rebuffs renewed talk of Andy Burnham leadership challenge
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Farage’s views on Russia likely to be further tested after jailing of Nathan Gill
The discovery of a pro-Russian asset, Nathan Gill, at the heart of a British political party reads like the plot of a John Le Carré novel.Russia was long known to have been trying to interfere in foreign politics with online bots and cyber-disinformation over the past decade.However, the Nathan Gill case is now a concrete example of a pro-Russian agent enlisting and paying a Brexit-friendly party politician to spread the propaganda of Moscow and against Ukraine in Europe.In the 1960s, it tended more to be Labour and far-left politicians who were largely the subject of Soviet attempts to plant agents in the west. In modern times, it is no surprise that the parties Gill represented were Ukip, the Brexit party, and briefly Reform UK
Starmer accuses ‘spineless’ Farage of failure to tackle racism in Reform party
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UK politics: Reeves ‘not even sure what the popular path is’ on the budget – as it happened
The UK cannot continue to “muddle through” and must take “a different path” on the economy, the chancellor has said.Ahead of her second budget on 26 November, Rachel Reeves told the Times that the country could not continue on its current trajectory. But she admitted she was “not even sure any more what the popular path is” amid calls for a wealth tax from some politicians and heavy tax and spending cuts from others.In the interview published on Friday, Reeves said:I’m not even sure any more what the popular path is.There are lots of people who say cut taxes and the economy will grow, but what spending would they cut? Borrowing is too high, but you can’t cut it overnight
Reform UK’s former Wales leader jailed for taking bribes for pro-Russia speeches
Reform UK’s former leader in Wales Nathan Gill has been jailed for 10 and a half years for taking bribes to make statements in favour of Russia when he was an MEP.Gill, a key member of the Ukip and Brexit party groups led by Nigel Farage in the European parliament, had pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery between 6 December 2018 and 18 July 2019.Police believe Gill received the equivalent of at least £30,000 and could have got even more from Oleg Voloshyn, a former Ukrainian MP and alleged Russian asset. He remains under investigation but is now believed to be in Moscow.Immediately after Gill was jailed, the defence minister Al Carns called on Farage’s party to launch a thorough investigation to guarantee that pro-Russia links were rooted out of Reform
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