Kilkeel Medical Practice: Calls for Department of Health to step in after GP contract is handed back - 9000 patients face uncertain future

Kilkeel Medical Practice confirmed that it has decided to hand back to the contract to deliver GP services to the Department of Health.

The decision will take effect on 1 November 2023, they said, but until then the practice will operate as normal.

Dr Alan Stout, chair of the British Medical Association GP Committee in NI, said some 15 GP practices across Northern Ireland have made a decision to hand back their contract in the past 12 months.

The Kilkeel practise has been unable to recruit GPs to fill several vacancies for some time, it said, and has been operating with half the workforce of three years ago.

As a result the management of the ever increasing workload has become "unsustainable" it added.

“We have been warning for years now that general practice is under extreme pressure," Dr Stout he told the News Letter. "This is due to increasing patient numbers, increasing complexity of patients presenting with complex co-morbidities, the dreadful waiting lists in secondary care and an ageing cohort of GPs.

“Being a GP partner is extremely challenging; it is essentially running a small but complex business that is underfunded while trying to see patients at the same time. This means that as GP partners decide to resign there is no-one willing to take on the job."

Handing the contract back from one practice increasingly seems like the only option but can then destabilise others nearby, he said.

He added: “There are not enough GPs being trained, being a partner is less and less appealing and the workload is simply unsustainable.”

South Down DUP MLA Diane Forsythe said the surgery has some 9000 patients.

"The surgery has been facing significant pressures over an extended period of time and this has been the result," she said. "There is a real need for planned reform of our Health Service, but announcements such as this are not part of that process.

"Uncertainty around GP practices only sees patients moving to other parts of the system and increasing pressures there, including on hospital Emergency Departments."

The Department of Health said it will now begin a process to develop alternative arrangements for these services.

The preferred option is to secure a GP contractor – or grouping of GPs – to take over the practice through a formal recruitment process. In some circumstances, Health and Social Care Trusts can take over a GP contract as an interim solution.

It said Kilkeel Medical Practice will continue to deliver GP services for the next six months and patients should continue to contact the practice as normal.

"The Department acknowledges the ongoing and significant pressures on GP practices, stemming from the fact that demand for their services is outstripping capacity to provide it,” it said.

The number of GP training places in NI has been increased by 70% from 2015 levels and the department will consider recommendations from the review of training places, it added.

It is also streamling processes to accept GPs who trained in other countries.