Streeting accuses GP leaders of ‘turning the NHS into a museum’
The health secretary has accused GP leaders of ‘conservatism’, saying that their dispute over access changes risks to ‘turn the NHS into a museum of 20th century healthcare’.
In his speech at the Labour party conference in Liverpool today, Wes Streeting said that the Government ‘won’t back down’ on changes to online GP access due to come into force tomorrow.
Mr Streeting told the conference that the changes are designed to make booking a GP appointment ‘as easy as booking a takeaway’ and said that ‘many GPs’ already offer this ‘because they have changed with the times’.
It comes after the BMA GP committee gave the Government 48 hours to avoid dispute with GPs over the contractual changes which will mean that practices will need to keep online systems open for patient requests between 8am and 6.30pm for routine enquiries regardless of capacity.
The union is arguing that because the systems cannot tell the difference between routine and urgent, serious problems could be missed if safeguards are not in place – and has voted in favour of re-entering dispute with the Government on 1 October over the changes.
As revealed exclusively by Pulse, the GPC demanded a deferral until the changes can be implemented safely, but this has not come to pass, and ICBs have been told by NHS England that they should ensure the changes are implemented.
Mr Streeting told the Labour conference: ‘Tomorrow, we are reforming general practice so patients can request appointments online at any point during the day.
‘Many GPs already offer this service because they have changed with the times – why shouldn’t be booking a GP appointment be as easy as booking a delivery, a taxi or a takeaway?
‘And our policy comes alongside a billion pounds of extra funding for general practice and 2,000 extra GPs. Yet the BMA threatens to oppose it – in 2025.
‘Well, I’ll give you this warning, if we give in to the forces of conservatism, they will turn the NHS into a museum of 20th century healthcare. We will always stand up for the interests of patients, and we won’t back down.’
Despite the trade dispute, GP practices still have to comply with the new obligations – but they will be ‘working under protest.
As part of the new requirements, by 1 October practices will also be required to allow community pharmacy to send consultation summaries into the GP practice workflow, using GP Connect Update Record – but the BMA warned that the technology is currently ‘not fit for purpose’.
Mr Streeting had already defended the new requirements earlier this month, when he told a BMA’s special representative meeting that the changes are achievable but some GPs just ‘don’t like’ them and have decided not to engage.
He had come under criticism from the BMA for calling some GPs ‘laggards’ during the exchange.
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READERS' COMMENTS [17]
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“why shouldn’t be booking a GP appointment be as easy as booking a delivery, a taxi or a takeaway?”
……because, unlike primary care, every additional taxi / pizza comes with additional funding?
Because the average dominos “chef” doesn’t have 2500 active customers each requesting a pizza every few weeks?
Because, barring anaphylaxis, getting the order wrong on a dominos won’t result in physical harm to the customer?
Do I need to go on Wes?
Maybe the BMA should (finally) realise that Wes is not a good faith actor and they should behave accordingly?
Why has the BMA not openly issued SOPs for primary care waiting lists (maybe called Wes’ Waiting Lists) so that it’s clear that he was the SoS for health that brought waiting lists from hospital into GP?
It always feels like we’ve brought a knife to a gun fight.
Actually spoilt my dinner listening to that vote grabbing sound bite speech. Glad only do Hospice & patients in many cases havent seen GP face 2 face in their EOL journey. It’s a piss poor service currently & no amount of AI or verbal gob shite will help. Need (sensible? boots on the ground IMHO
Two highlights, amongst many in my career a) indigestion = inferior MI b) new born infantile colic = adrenal-genital syndrome. If AI can pick this & similar out then I’ll happily accept Steetings bleatings.
Oh dear. A Health Secretary that doesn’t understand the difference between General Practice and a hairdresser, Just Eat or Uber yet continues to insult the professionals managing millions of contacts within the NHS every day. Beyond disappointing to see such incompetence.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s plan to force practices to keep online appointment systems open from 8am to 6:30pm, starting is being sold as making GP bookings “as easy as ordering a takeaway.” But let’s be clear: healthcare isn’t a late-night take-away order or an Uber ride you book on a whim. You wouldn’t hop on an urgent flight without checking if the plane’s got wings, yet this reform barrels forward without safeguards, risking a crash-landing for patients and the NHS.
The British Medical Association has rightly warned that these online systems can’t tell a sore throat from a heart attack. Without proper triage, urgent cases could drown in a sea of routine requests, leading to missed diagnoses, delays, or worse. GPs are already burned out, and this top-down mandate—slapped on without stress-testing the tech (like the creaky GP Connect system) or listening to frontline clinicians, feels like redesigning air traffic control to mimic a food delivery app. The £1 billion and 2,000 extra GPs sound nice, but they’re window dressing if capacity and tech gaps aren’t addressed. Forcing practices to comply “under protest” while dismissing critics as “laggards” or “conservative” only buries the NHS deeper in a museum of bad policymaking.
I invite Wes Streeting to sit with me for a day in a GP practice. Let’s walk through the chaos of this half-baked plan together. Perhaps he’ll find it illuminating when he sees how deep the obstacles run. The NHS deserves better than a rushed experiment where you get what you pay for, and patients deserve more than a policymaker playing app-developer with their health.
To paraphrase an old one.
How do you know a politician does not know what they are talking about?
Their lips are moving
GPs have to get militant or the profession’s finished, we’ve been far too passive and apolitical for far too long.
He certainly knows how to make himself unpopular with the profession. He has no care for staff that work in the nhs that is secondary or primary care . The words that come out of his mouth are worthless and dangerous sometimes. Why no government can’t have a healthcare professional as minister of health is beyond me and not a puppet of the government. I know and pigs might fly
‘turn the NHS into a museum of 20th century healthcare’ – whereas Starmer and Co are becoming the graveyard for labour politics….
C’mon Zack of the Greens, let’s hear more from you about funding traditional patient-care NHS via MMT mechanisms..
Proving what we knew about him when he came out initially saying he wanted to abolish “murky partnership practices”
The truth is he hasn’t got the foggiest. He’s had some ambitious Whitehall civil servant tell him this will work and will keep him in his sodding seat for another decade. It’s bol***s and we all know it is.
Seemingly we’ve been let down by GPC again…
Primary care is no barrier to progress. Look what we’ve done the last 5 years.
Really ignorant comments
oh no…. would have to work even more harder for £300k 🙂
This all has a distinct whiff of Blair and Milburn. Maybe the TBI has commented approvingly on the changes ?
Well beyond capacity already, as we are for rest of October, so turned off access. And which genius thought it would be a good idea to make thus sh….show mandatory just as Flu vaccinstion campaigns kick off?
Streeting continues to state he wishes to work with the profession whilst actively working against them having isolated junior doctors , Consultants and now General Practice . Turning GPs into glorified medical triage NHS 11 call handlers via enforced misuse of the digital & online smokescreens to cover up a collapsing NHS infrastructure will only accelerate digital exclusion in an environment where it is already used but in an appropriate manner by GPs. The lack of Streeting’s NHS experience and his continued denigration and fragmentation of General Practice away from its core effective wide ranging generalist specialty which he clearly does not understand and the work it does, into a progressively online service will only act to enhance burnout , dissatisfaction, poor patient experience and further workforce crisis once the consequences start to be felt further down the line.
Well, he’s done a great job keeping takeaways alive by supervising the rationing of Mounjaro for weight loss on the NHS to about 6 people nationally. Maybe there’s hope yet.
NHS certainly belongs in a Museum; The Museum of Socialist Failure perhaps, along with E Germany and the Soviet Union.
Please can we replace it with something a bit less rubbish? Perhaps try Taiwan and Australia to start for ideas.