Charley Webb urges fans not to put off visit to the doctors

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Figures obtained through freedom of information requests show that 2.5 million people have been affected since 2013. The reasons included problems recruiting, high workloads and single-handed GPs ­having no one to take on their contract. Professor Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said the closures were “likely to be distressing for the ­millions of patients who have lost the ­practice they are familiar with”.

He added: “Some of the closures will be due to practices merging or working in ­different ways, but some will have had no choice but to close. This must be addressed.

“General practice was dealing with an unsustainable workload and practices were struggling to recruit sufficient numbers of GPs and practice staff to handle it.

“The p­andemic has only exacerbated these pressures. This has resulted in GPs feeling burnt out and leaving the ­profession before they planned to.”

There are around 6,600 surgeries in England. The closures were released by GP magazine Pulse, which requested data from health authorities across the UK.

Information returned by 124 out of ­155 showed 778 practices closed in the last eight years.

Just 18 shut in 2013, with ­closures peaking at 138 in 2018. Last year 96 surgeries closed – 85 in England, four in Scotland, four in Wales and three in Northern Ireland.

Dr Mark Sanford-Wood, deputy chair of the British Medical Association’s GP committee, called on health leaders to provide more support. He said: “General practice is busier than ever. We absolutely cannot afford to lose any more practices.”

An NHS spokesman said: “This represents a small number of practices and some closures are the result of mergers.”

Comment by professor Martin Marshall

It’s clear that general practice is under severe pressure.

Almost five million more consultations were made in March than in February. More than 2.25 million more were made in March this year than they were in the same month in 2019.

These figures don’t reflect the leading role GPs and our teams are taking protecting patients through the Covid vaccination programme.

The profession was working under intense workload and workforce pressures before the pandemic which has exacerbated this.

One result of this is GPs burning out and leaving the profession earlier than they planned and as we are seeing today some surgeries are being forced to close.

We urgently need more GPs and other members of the practice team to manage increasing workload.

Good progress has been made to encourage medical students to choose general practice, but we also need plans to keep existing GPs in the workforce, protecting them from burning out by addressing “undoable” workload.

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