A senior health official has said GP services are under “significant pressure” after concerns were raised about difficulty accessing a practice in Johnstone.
Christine Laverty, chief officer of Renfrewshire Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP), said she was “aware of issues” patients were having but highlighted the challenges surrounding retention and recruitment of doctors.
Speaking at the integration joint board (IJB) on Friday, she said they were looking at ways of supporting GPs in a bid to ease their workload but added it was a “work in progress”.
The update was provided in response to Councillor Iain McMillan, a representative for Johnstone and member of the IJB, who said “a lot of frustration” was being caused by a practice in the town.
He said: “I’ve been going on about this for a wee while, about one in Johnstone, which seems to be closed most of the time to non-emergencies.
“It seems like every other week, patients, including my good self, get a message to say, ‘Don’t bother coming anywhere near us because we don’t have anybody here.’
“That’s causing a lot of frustration.”
Ms Laverty said: “In terms of the primary care, it is really challenging because of the finances and part of the work we are doing within Greater Glasgow and Clyde is we’re developing a primary care strategy to look at, is there ways that we can work differently?
“You’ll know that GPs are independent contractors, so the health board contract with GPs but we don’t manage GPs as such.
“If Stuart [Sutton] was here, our clinical director, he would give you some reassurance that we work really closely in Renfrewshire with our primary care, with our GPs, and we are aware of some of the issues because you’ve raised them with us.
“GP practices are under significant pressure. There’s a real challenge nationally about retention and recruitment of GPs.
“We are looking at how best we can support GPs to maybe take some work away from GPs and spread that across the multi-disciplinary teams that we have been able to develop through the funding that we did get, so that actually GPs are available and they’ve got increased capacity to see the people that they need to see but that is a work in progress.”
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