General practitioners (GPs) in England voted to carry out collective action starting immediately over a funding dispute.
ADVERTISEMENTGPs in England have voted in favour of taking collective action such as limiting the number of patients they see, refusing to share patient data, or referring patients directly to specialists to avoid longer processes, their union said.
The British Medical Association (BMA) said 98.3 per cent of the more than 8,500 GPs who took part in a ballot voted in favour of industrial action to support increasing the UK's budget for family doctors.
"Despite warning the Government that they’re being forced to do more with less, GPs have been repeatedly ignored and not given the funding they need to handle growing pressures," the BMA said in a statement.
The union described the collective action as “an act of desperation".
It said a new contract between doctors and the previous government, which will see services given a 1.9 per cent funding increase for 2024-25, means many practices will struggle to stay financially viable.
Doctors' practices are funded by the government and run as independent businesses.
“We are witnessing general practice being broken,” said Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer, chair of the union’s general practice committee for England.
“The era of the family doctor has been wiped out by recent consecutive governments and our patients are suffering as a result."
'Impact may not be felt for some time'
The UK's National Health Service (NHS) said doctors’ offices would remain open and the impact would vary from place to place.
The newly elected Labour Party government has made a priority of ending more than a year of strikes by public sector workers including teachers, nurses and hospital doctors, who say their pay has plummeted in real terms as their workload has grown due to increasing demand.
One of the government’s first acts was to strike a pay deal with junior doctors, who make up about half of the total medical workforce and form the backbone of hospital and clinic care.
They will receive a 22 per cent pay increase over two years in return for ending a series of strikes that piled pressure on the chronically overstretched NHS.
Bramall-Stainer added, meanwhile, that the union understood the new government "has inherited a broken NHS" and said the BMA had "some positive conversations with the new Health Secretary about the situation in general practice".
"This will not be a ‘big bang’. It will be a slow burn. It’s likely that impact may not be felt for some time. We hope this will give the new Government time to consider our proposed solutions including fixing our contract once and for all," she said in a statement.
