THE NUMBER of patients per GP in Wales is over twice the European average, raising concerns about primary care availability for hundreds of thousands of patients across the country.

In 2024, a report by BMA Cymru Wales showed that the European average for patients per GP was around 1,000. In Wales, the average is 2,210 patients per full-time GP. Over the last decade, the average number of patients per practice has increased by just under 25%.

RURAL ISSUES

Over the past decade, the number of GP practices in Wales has decreased by 18%, dropping from 470 to 378. This decline is due to a combination of closures and mergers, reflecting broader challenges in general practice, such as workforce shortages and increasing patient demand.

The situation is worsened by the fact that around 80% of Wales’s land area is relatively sparsely populated, consisting of small settlements grouped around former market towns. New GPs are overwhelmingly concentrated in Wales’s few larger urban centres, chiefly along the M4 corridor and the North East Wales border area.

This means rural patients often have to travel significantly longer distances to access GP services compared to urban residents. The closure of rural practices forces patients to register with larger, more distant surgeries, increasing the patient-to-GP ratio. This results in longer waiting times and reduced appointment availability.

Long travel times and a lack of transport deter individuals from seeking timely care, leading to delays in diagnosis and treatment. By the time patients present for clinical care, their conditions may have worsened, making treatment more expensive and reducing the likelihood of positive clinical outcomes.

And that is before patients are placed on one of the NHS’s lengthy waiting lists for diagnosis and treatment.

The older age profile of Wales’s rural GPs was long recognised as a ticking time bomb under primary care. Yet, efforts to stem the outflow of GPs from rural Wales have been patchy and ineffective. Changes to pension rules have accelerated retirements, and as older rural GPs leave the profession, replacing them has become increasingly difficult.

The reasons are clear. Rural Wales faces huge difficulties attracting and retaining GPs due to professional isolation, fewer career development opportunities, and a lack of interest in rural practice partnerships. These factors have led to a reliance on locum doctors or salaried GPs, which in turn can disrupt continuity of care.

IN PEMBROKESHIRE

Practice closures and the shortage of GPs have hit Pembrokeshire hard.

The Argyle Medical Group in Pembroke Dock is the second-largest GP practice in Wales, with around 25,000 patients registered and just nine GPs—an average of 2,800 patients per GP. In 2021, the practice had 10.75 full-time equivalent GPs and was seeking to recruit more. However, due to a lack of available GPs, the practice was forced to withdraw from its Neyland practice at St Clement’s Surgery and reduce hours at St Oswald’s Surgery in Pembroke.

As a knock-on effect of the Neyland closure, patients were transferred to the Neyland and Johnston Medical Practice, which eventually handed back its GP contract following retirements and recruitment difficulties. Its patients are now serviced by salaried and locum GPs employed by the Health Board.

The same issues have plagued GP practices from Tenby in Pembrokeshire’s southeast to St Davids in the northwest. While it would be a stretch to say that “GP deserts” exist in the same way as “NHS dental deserts,” the increasing patient load on hospitals suggests that many people are now seeking treatment at A&E for conditions that would previously have been managed by a GP.

The Welsh Government’s approach is to ask patients to self-triage before going to hospital—an impractical and, for many, heartless solution. If you are a parent with a child in agony and unable to tell you what is wrong, what would you do?

SITUATION NORMAL, SITUATION CRITICAL

In 2018, the Welsh Government announced a plan to recruit 1,000 GPs into NHS general practice in Wales. While the number of GPs has increased, it has not risen by anything close to 1,000. Worse still, the number of full-time GPs has actually fallen.

What this means is that while there are technically more GPs in total, there are fewer available in practice because many of the new recruits work part-time, as locums, or on limited contracts (for example, as doctors on call).

It’s the same statistical sleight of hand used to describe frontline clinical staff in the Welsh NHS. Welsh Government ministers proudly claim that the Welsh NHS employs more people than ever, yet the number of full-time staff has plummeted.

In an attempt to address the GP shortage, the Welsh Government has increased the number of routine clinical assessments and treatments that pharmacists and practice nurses can undertake. However, only seven relatively minor ailments can be treated by pharmacists independently, while practice nurses must have GP approval to prescribe medication.

Expanding community-based healthcare is a sensible aim, but it is undermined by the critical shortage of full-time GPs in rural Wales. There are not enough independent prescribing pharmacists or community nurses to fill the gap. The reliance on locum GPs disrupts continuity of care, leading to situations where patients are taken off long-term medication without explanation or, worse, experiencing increased risks of missed or misdiagnosed conditions.

Wales has reached a tipping point.

Politicians frequently offer warm words about “our NHS,” “our precious NHS,” and “our wonderful NHS nurses and doctors,” but none have publicly acknowledged that the foundation of NHS care—GP surgeries as the first point of contact for the sick—has buckled. If they did, they would have to come up with real solutions instead of blaming patients for being ill or making vague promises about digital medicine transforming rural healthcare.

The situation is critical.

In Wales, that passes for normal..