Employing healthcare workers other than GPs or nurses leads to a drop in patient satisfaction, a large study has found.
Policies to introduce more social prescribers, pharmacists, paramedics, physiotherapists and physician associates has also not freed up time for GPs, an analysis of more than 6,000 GP practices has suggested.
Researchers behind the most detailed study yet of the introduction of newer roles into the primary care team, said their findings had ‘profound implications’ for policy makers.
The analysis of GP practices in England between 2015 and 2019 found employment increased for all groups over the four-year period but the smallest increase was for nurses and the largest was for ‘healthcare professionals’, a group that included clinical pharmacists, physiotherapists, physician associates, paramedics, podiatrists, counsellors, and occupational therapists.
Having more GPs and nurses led to positive changes to practice activity and outcomes, they reported in Social Science and Medicine.
But there were larger drops in patient satisfaction in practices that had taken on more healthcare professionals.
On average, for one extra full-time healthcare professional employed at a GP practice there was a 2.4% drop in overall patient satisfaction, the team from the University of Manchester reported and a 1.3% drop in patient satisfaction with making an appointment.
The researchers did find that pharmacists contributed positively towards some tasks, improving the quality of medicine prescription and reducing the burden of these activities for existing staff.
Yet overall there was ‘little evidence’ of any complementarity or substitution between different staff groups, suggesting that the additional staff were not freeing up GP or nurse time to do other work or making practices more efficient, the researchers concluded.
GP networks in England have hired 1,000 new members of staff under the ARRS scheme in the past three months, recent figures show.
Study leader Dr Igor Francetic said it was a complex picture and not about whether these roles should be there at all but about how they should be integrated and what tasks they should do or patients they should see.
‘The introduction of new roles to support GPs does not have straightforward effects on service quality or patient satisfaction.
‘In fact, we provide substantial evidence of detrimental effects on patient satisfaction when some health professionals and healthcare associate professionals are employed.
‘Patient satisfaction is a crucial dimension of quality of care, as it contributes to individuals’ willingness to seek care through GPs.’
He added that the findings counter the common wisdom that some of these new roles will reduce the workload of existing GPs.
‘The introduction of several of these new roles requires substantial supervision from GPs and complex changes to how work is organised that may ultimately reduce efficiency,’ he said.
Professor Azeem Majeed, professor of primary care and public health at Imperial College London, said: ‘The study confirms what many GPs are hearing from their patients – that patients often want to see a GP or nurse rather than another type of healthcare practitioner.
‘It may be over time, patients get more used to seeing other type of healthcare practitioners and patient satisfaction improves. Given the reality of falling GP numbers in England, other types of healthcare practitioners will have to play a bigger role in the delivery of primary healthcare.’
Professor Joanne Reeve, professor of primary care research at Hull York Medical School, said the results were consistent with other pieces of work starting to come out.
‘It’s showing it’s not as straightforward as everybody thinks it is and there is an assumption that you can swap one person with another and it doesn’t recognise that a significant proportion of work in primary care cannot be reduced to if you do a, that means b and you do c.
‘There is a misunderstanding of what primary care is doing. The second issue is patient expectation and what we are able to provide.’
She added: ‘The expanded primary care team is fantastic but at the moment the way the system has brought them in is as a substitution for GP roles. The reality is we’re in dire straits and it puts those staff in a difficult position, puts GPs in a difficult position and it’s bad for patients.’
NHS England recently announced the ‘rapid recruitment’ of up to 2,000 additional social prescribing link workers, health coaches and care coordinators among measures to alleviate GP pressures this winter.
READERS' COMMENTS [13]
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No way
Common wisdom!! insert Common ignorance…..at least this article is sensible, but just what we have been saying all along!
The solution to radically improve general practice is pretty simple. Remove all the red tape and directed funding and allow practices to make decisions about what to do with funding.
Who would have thought it punters want to seen Drs and Nurses.Maybe they should treat these professionals a little better than they have done for the last 2 decades.One suspect it is two late to rescue the workforce and punter will have to accept what they are give by their lords and masters.
Yep and bears shit in the woods too!
Dare I ask who funded this Ignoble quality piece of work.
Reduces GP satisfaction too. Managers and CD’s are running around trying to make a name for themselves (simultaneously avoiding the day job as much as they can) when we all know this whole exercise is a complete bag of sh*t. It is just exacerbating the exodus of the doctors (remember those?) which further necessitates the adoption of more non clinical roles in a completely futile attempt to plug the capacity gap. Primary care is in its death throws. The corpse is barely twitching.
In other news – Matt Hancock has now joined the Metaverse. The virtual world of nothingness where most of that lot live.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/matt-hancock-joins-the-metaverse
What it proves is that the more access points you create the more they will get used .
1st contact MSK has had a significant impact on workload reduction for the acute care team, and practice pharmacists have significantly impacted on routine apts for simple chats re statins, medication titration and similar
Why do the central planners only give money with strings attached as to who can be employed? Do they believe us to be to stupid to allocate funds appropriately according to our patient and practice need?
SG – Yes. We need to remember here that – in the same way it is a minority choosing the next PM it is a minority (mail and Telegraph readers) that set main government policy on public services, and current policy is not to trust you. The chip on their self righteous shoulders can be seen from the moon. The shift to non clinical staff, which is I suspect particularly unpopular amongst this demographic, is ironically what they have been unwittingly asking for. I take some comfort from this.
when all the ARRS money is spent and primary care is worse nobody will ever approve increased investment in General Practice again and the whole system will need reevaluating
if most of us had this money as our own we would have invested it very differently in our practices with better outcomes
ARRS we’re always second prize given the paucity of GPs.
Having created a toxic environment that drove doctors away, NHSE had little choice other than to promote employing an army of noctors to plug the gaps.
Many of these ARRS are superb at their jobs and a Godsend for many drowning practices.
Of course, nobody told the patients, who bitterly complain about never seeing a doctor when allocated a PA/pharmacist.
The irony is that GPs are spending more time supervising/debriefing their ARRS, which inevitably eats into their own surgery time, thus reducing GP appointments even more.
Patients need to accept that there is no going back to Ye Good Olde Days of “my GP”, and that for better or worse, ARRS are the future of Primary Care.