Southampton is facing a health crisis due to a shortage of GPs, according to doctors and council leaders

City council chief Simon Letts says the number of GPs leaving practices in the city means there may not be enough to run current levels of services, and he has been supported by a current GP who says a shortage of doctors has already led to some practices closing.

General Practitioners (GPs) in the city are warning that the situation will only get worst in the face of ongoing budget cuts, which next year sees another £2m shaved off primary care funding in Southampton.

That shortage is being keenly felt in Southampton which has high levels of deprivation and long standing problems with high rates of heart attacks, teenage pregnancies and smoking.

And there are now fears that the situation could get worse next year with a number of GPs expected to leave their positions and no replacements currently identified.

Cllr Letts told the Daily Echo: “There is an impending crisis in GP numbers in the city.

“The Government wants to run extra services but we are not going to have enough GPs to run our current services, let alone expanded ones.

“The CCG has made us aware that they are concerned there will not be enough GPs in the city within the next 12 months as so many are retiring.”

Dr Peter Goodall, pictured below, a practice partner for 20 years at the Walnut Tree surgery in Southampton, said care for some conditions is increasingly being moved into the primary care sector and more specifically GPs which is leading to extra workload but without the increase in funding.

In Southampton he claimed that during the last 18 months one practice had closed, three had merged with other practices and two had been taken over by private companies.

NHS England has disputed some of his claims, saying two small practices had merged and another one had closed because the sole GP had retired. It denied that any surgeries were now being run by private companies.

Dr Goodall said: “When you see that 90 per cent of all patient contact with the NHS is with their GP it seems incredible that we get less than 10 per cent of that primary care budget.

“There is certainly a crisis in the recruitment of GPs. Around a third of all practices in Southampton cannot recruit doctors to fill their vacancies. Either they have had no response or only a handful of applications.

“Too many GPs are leaving the profession either retiring or just leaving because they have had enough.

“In the last 12 months six of my colleagues have left the profession before retirement age because of workload pressures and extra regulation.”

He said as a result he had seen a drop in the standard of care given to patients.

“Particularly in the last five years, there has been a significant deterioration in the quality of care we are providing,” Dr Goodall said, “for me that is really sad that we can’t deliver the standard of care we want to.”

He said that in the last year along waiting times at his practice alone had rocketed from a one-to-two day wait for an appointment, to a seven-to-ten day wait.

Dr Goodall accused Whitehall of not spending enough on GP-related services in Southampton and complained that the amount was decreasing still further next year.

NHS England said GP practices across the country were facing pressure from increased demand but claimed it “did not recognise” some of the Southampton-related figures that were being quoted.

A spokesman said: “Two small practices have merged and one has closed because the GP has retired. No private companies have taken over services.”

Southampton Clinical Commissioning Group did not say how many GPs it expects to be working in the city next year, but said there are currently 188 and that the situation in terms of recruiting more GPs “reflects the national position”.

Dr Sue Robinson, the CCG’s clinical chair and a local GP, said a new strategy for developing primary care was being drawn up and added: “We are clear that General Practice has a central role to play in the future provision of health services to our population.

"Nonetheless, the changing needs of the city combined with workforce and economic challenges mean that the way care is organised will need to change in order to be sustainable for the future.

"By working constructively with our GPs, other care professionals, patients and the public we will be able to define how this can be done successfully."