Is the GP strike the end of healthcare as we know it?

General practitioners in England have voted overwhelmingly to take a form of industrial action in protest at a 1.9 per cent increase in public funding for surgeries.

- SEAN O'GRADY

The GPs will be working to their contracts for the foreseeable future, and have thus created a major problem for the NHS in patient care, and for the new government in trying to fulfil its manifesto promises to reform, fund and fix the health service.

It’s the first such “national” action (albeit Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own devolved arrangements) and a substantial challenge to the authority of Wes Streeting, the health secretary.

Didn’t the doctors just get a 22 per cent pay rise?

The junior doctors in hospitals and clinics, employed as staff by the NHS, have indeed had their long-held claim settled (though not without the threat of further strikes). However, GPs are selfemployed and their practices are effectively small (or not-sosmall) businesses, with all the pressures that entails. It is an odd arrangement because their sole “customer” is the NHS, which agrees services with them but negotiates collectively on a national basis with the British Medical Association.

The anomalous arrangement goes back to the genesis of the NHS in 1948, when Nye Bevan, father of the service, said he had to “stuff their mouths with gold” and allow doctors their autonomy and freedom to take on private patients.

Will it make it harder to see the doctor?