NHS England reviewing estate as GP practices have ‘twice as much’ space as needed

GP practices have ‘about twice as much floor space’ as needed, prompting a review by NHS England on how this could be better utilised by neighbourhood services, the commissioner’s chair has said.

Dr Penny Dash said that NHS England is working with every ICB to work out ‘where we have we got space that we can use’ in ‘poorly utilised’ GP premises for neighbourhood health services.

Speaking at the Company Chemists’ Association conference, which was attended by Pulse’s sister title Healthcare Leader, Dr Dash said: ‘We are actively doing some work at the moment in NHS England, looking at our estate, but broad finger in the air, we’ve got about twice as much floor space that we use for GP practices and associated services than we actually need, twice as much.

‘Now, of course, many of those practices are in poor condition. Many of those practices are poorly utilised again.

‘It’s true that often they are busy between 8:30 and 11:30 Monday to Thursday, and it’s true that they’re busy between 3:30 and 6:30 Monday to Thursday.

‘If you turn up between 11:30 and 3, that’s, “you know, we’re out doing visits”. I’m like “yes, you’re busy, but you’re not using the space”.’

She said that this was a ‘really significant mindset shift that we’re going to need to go through’ for neighbourhood services to work in the most efficient way.

She added: ‘If we want to invest in either refurbished or new facilities for neighbourhood health, for out of hospital care, then it makes sense to do that in an efficient way.

‘We’re not a country that’s sitting on trillions and trillions that we can invest in loads of new buildings.’

Today, experts giving evidence to the House of Commons’ Health and Social Care Committee pushed back on Dr Dash’s statement.

RCGP vice president for member standards Dr Jamie Hynes said: ‘We have 64% of partners in our latest survey saying they don’t have sufficient space to accommodate staff.

‘We have 500 practice managers [in the survey], 74% of them say they can’t recruit because they have a lack of physical space.’

Louisa Wood, chief operating officer at GP practice group Mereside Medical said: ‘I just have to laugh at the idea, to be honest, that there’s twice as much space available in our case, our GIA [gross internal area] is 952 square meters for Stratford Medical Centre.

‘Our ICB zone formula says we should have double that, and the reason we don’t is because of delays trying to get a newbuild built, and the consequence of that is really significant.

‘It makes me quite cross, actually, to think that there’s a message out there that is telling you that it’s easy, that we have lots of space, that the working environment that we can offer to our staff is anything approximating acceptable.

‘It’s embarrassing. We have to have staff meetings in our cars because there is no meeting room. We don’t have enough consulting rooms to see the patients.’

It comes after the Government said it would approve the first proposals for neighbourhood health centres by the summer, however it has received a lot of ICB proposals for estates upgrades that it ‘can’t afford’.

The Government plans for 250 neighbourhood health centres to be created in England, which NHS England advised should be ‘anchored around general practice’.

RCGP surveys have previously found that four in 10 GP practice staff describe their premises as ‘unfit for purpose’, and a third of GPs say their practice is ‘inadequate for providing care for patients’.