National Campaign: Put Patients First

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and the National Association for Patient Participation (N.A.P.P.) are running a major campaign, called Put patients first: Back general practice, which aims to persuade the four governments of the UK to increase investment in general practice – so that practice teams everywhere have the resources they need to continue to provide the high quality care patients deserve.

Our campaign, launched last November, has already started to make real headway: generating wall-to-wall national media coverage and persuading many prominent politicians to say publicly that general practice is underfunded. However, to convince ministers and other politicians to back up their supportive words with new resources we urgently need your support.

As part of the campaign, your practice should have received posters and a petition through the post. We would be extremely grateful if you could please display these very publicly in order to generate support among your patients for the cause of general practice.

If, together, we can collect a million signatures we will be able to show politicians, in each of the four nations, that patients back our cause for the level of investment in general practice to be increased from the current historic low of 8.39% to 11% of the UK NHS budget by 2017. This would be the equivalent of an increase of £2.8bn for general practice per year – and allow practice teams to deliver, among other things, shorter waiting times, longer consultations and better continuity of care.

We are regulated by the Care Quality Commision