Derry GP practice to move to hybrid model of NHS and paid services
A Derry GP is converting his practice into the first in the North to operate with both private as well as NHS patients who will continue to receive free services.
Dr Tom Black, who runs Abbey Medical, which serves the Bogside and Brandywell, promised the move will not affect existing patients, but will make the GP run more like those in the South.
“Abbey Medical, which looks after 6,800 patients, will continue as an NHS practice and will continue to provide free services for those patients. So none of our patients will pay for anything,” he said.
“But to subsidise that we're going to work extra on the side and earn money from seeing private patients from other practices and use that money, first of all, to pay off the overdraft, which is significant and secondly, to subsidise the NHS practice.
“It's a similar model to what dentists are doing or if you go across the border to Buncrana the GPs have two types of patients. One group of patients are HSE, the equivalent of the NHS, and the others are private and to be frank the paid private patients would subsidise the state run services.”
He said he would like to avoid the move but the practice has ‘been losing money every month for 14 months’ so this was the last resort.
Additionally, he said the Department of Health had promised a 6% uplift in funding in early April but has not delivered.
“What we've got is a series of Tory governments undercutting healthcare spend for 13 years. Then we have Stormont incompetence on top of that.
“We're losing staff, receptionists, doctors, because we don't have enough money to run the place. We ended up having to increase staff pay by 8% across nurses, receptionists, managers, etc. But we didn't have the 8% because Stormont hadn't given us the 6%.
“We're knee-deep in debt to the bank. We've mapped this forward and sometime next year, we'll end up probably within the next six months we'll have to close because the Bank will stop lending money to us.
Dr Black said cutting staff or services had to be avoided at all costs, because the area the practice serves is a 'high deprivation area'.
“We've already cut GP’s wages every year for five years, one of our doctors has already left and we're losing another next year so you couldn't even cut back on that part.
“No matter how many cuts I brought in I could not get it into the black again.
“ I never thought I'd see myself here but there's no doubt that the incompetence of Stormont has left our situation in a precarious state. If we don't help ourselves, then this practice will close. We've already had two practices close in Derry out of the 15 and there'll be at least a few more if we don't watch ourselves.
The private practice will open in January and Dr Black, who is also chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) in the North, imagines more GPs will follow suit.
“I have no doubt and I've already put an option paper into the BMA suggesting that this is the way forward in the medium term and I'm serious about it not being short term, this is medium term because we can't trust Stormont anymore.
“We have to put general practices in a place where we don't have to rely on Stormont because they're not reliable. So we're going forward to find ourselves in a place where all of the practices in Northern Ireland can take this option if they want.
"I don't think all will but I think many practices who would be at risk of closing this winter will actually take this option now and over the next year we will see multiple practices adopting this scheme.”