A GP has lifted the lid on some of the severe pressures he is facing in his County Durham practice. Stuart Arnold reports

“I’ve never rung a newspaper in my life, but no-one is talking about this and the public haven’t got the faintest idea what is happening”, said the voice on the other end of the phone.

Such is the frustration of one North Durham GP, who has spoken to The Northern Echo, but did not want to give his name.

“I think I’m speaking for everybody when I say we have every day an unachievable workload we cannot safely do,” he says.

“You get into work at 8am and there is no break, I usually give up at about six or 6.30pm because I am so tired and I cannot trust myself to look at blood results.

"In the course of a day I’ll be on visits, then I’m back to the surgery doing referral letters, then I might be called out again, then I’ll have a surgery and that generates more work.

"Not only that, there is a pile of insurance reports which need doing for people trying to get mortgages and health insurance which means more time.

“There are senior, excellent GPs from this area who have just walked, they might be 55, these people are ambitious, they are leaders and they have just had enough.”

The GP says the profession is a victim of its own success.

“People are living longer, but they live longer to get ill and inevitably end up with multiple illnesses,” he adds.

“In the past that was always dealt with by consultants and specialists in clinics, but it’s now part of our workload in the community and the model of primary care as it exists is not designed to cope.

“I could work 15 hours a day and still not get through my work, it is never-ending. You have palliative care meetings once a month, which happens on a lunchtime I’m already not getting. There are many of these things and more meetings.

“The Government scrapped Primary Care Trusts and brought in GP-led commissioning who commission all of the services, except these are doctors who were already strapped doing what they were doing so many hours a week, there is no backfill.”

The doctor says the “dropping off a cliff” in terms of some of the workforce retiring had been flagged up to the Government for years, but they had done nothing about it.

“Even if they say yes we are going to recruit loads more doctors, it takes time. We might recruit foreigners, but you have to ask do they want to work here? They’ll come and not stay once they see how bad it is.”

He says the Government’s agenda was privatisation – “either that or they are utterly incompetent” –and funding for primary care within the NHS was “paltry”.

Referring to the prospect of resignations among GPs, he says: “It wouldn’t even need everyone to do it, it would only need 20 to 30 per cent of us and the whole thing would come crashing down.

“However, I don’t want to quit. We just want a working life that is sustainable. The Government is bringing in working on weekends as well, which is fine.

“If Nissan get a new car contract in Sunderland they build a new factory or get in a whole load of new workers and it is a brilliant thing for the area.

“But if doctors all of a sudden have to do a load of extra shifts as we are, they don’t build new places or get in new doctors. It is the same doctors who are there all week.”