NHS Tayside is in a “vicious circle” of overspending, a leading Dundee GP has admitted.
Dr Andrew Cowie, chairman of the Tayside Local Medical Committee, told the Tele that many GP practices in Tayside are at breaking point.
He spoke to the Tele following a report which revealed NHS Tayside needs to make £175 million of savings over the next five years.
Auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers has said the board will have to save an average of £35m a year from its budget in order to stay “financially sustainable”, with cuts set to come in workforce, drugs and prescribing and procurement.
Dr Cowie, who is a GP at Dundee’s Hawkhill Medical Centre, said: “Some facilities are at breaking point.
“To save money, one of the key areas is always going to be staffing. There’s only so much pressure you can put on staff before they decide they are going somewhere else.
“So then, you are forced to employ agency staff, and end up in this kind of ‘death spiral’, where you are paying these huge amounts of money.
“You have situations where four GPs are sometimes doing the work of six. There will come a point where that is simply impossible — you can’t do it any more.
“That’s why we’ve recently seen practices like Whitfield and Lochee taken over by the board as doctors just couldn’t keep up with the demand. The same happened in Brechin.
“If you don’t have the GPs, you reduce primary care, which is the most efficient way of dealing with patients.
“That puts more strain on facilities like Ninewells as you have more people going to A&E or hospital, using more specialist care and the cost spirals in this “vicious circle” situation.
“More people will be in Ninewells and beds will be filling up. If there are no beds then surgeries will be cancelled and waiting times will go up.
“So, the board has to pour money into working weekends, or sending patients to outside, private healthcare providers at a relatively large cost.
“Legally, these patients have to be treated, so it has to be done. You can’t abandon people.”
An NHS Tayside spokeswoman said that, like all health boards in Scotland, it was trying to “drive out waste in its spending every year to ensure that frontline services were protected” and had “ambitious plans” over the next five years to “transform healthcare”.