In recent years, primary care provision in the United Kingdom has faced an array of challenges that have significantly reshaped its landscape.
Healthcare professionals face increasing workloads due to rising patient demands, decreasing GP numbers, and limited resources. All have decisive impacts on the quality of primary care provision and collective job satisfaction amongst healthcare professionals. The after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are being felt acutely in the methods of primary care provision, where remote consultations and telephone appointments have been drawn from the peripheries into the mainstream of care. Disputes relating to pay, conditions, and workload continue to fuel industrial action, which is expected to cause significant disruption over the Christmas and New Year season.
Some have suggested that technology and a burgeoning artificial intelligence industry might hold the answers to rescuing primary care from the precipice. There nonetheless remains scepticism about technology’s ability to affect change on a significant scale in the near future.
Following discussions with Dr. Lisa Cameron MP, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Health Group, CREATION.co was eager to investigate the crisis in primary care from the perspective of the health worker with first hand experience of the challenges facing the service. This report serves as a summary of CREATION. co’s pioneering research into the crisis facing the primary care sector, and, more specifically, what the some 100,000 healthcare professionals online are discussing in relation to the crisis.
The report is divided into four sections. The first discusses the scale of workload issues amongst healthcare staff in the primary care sector; the second evaluates the benefits and drawbacks of alternative primary care provision methods; the third investigates the causes of industrial action; and the fourth discusses the potential of technological innovation in effectively tackling the crisis.
Throughout each section, discussions are grounded in the insights derived from CREATION Pinpoint technology and the thousands of online conversations between UK healthcare professionals.