For many years, The Wye Valley Practice has provided several services that do not fall under our core Primary Care General Medical Services (GMS) contract, but are the remit of Secondary Care (hospitals). We offered these because we believed a local offer for services for patients is important for your continuity of care, access and convenience. Moreover, historical GMS funding, appointment capacity and business finances allowed us to do this.
However, General Practice is facing unprecedented challenges across the country; receiving less percentage of the NHS funding year on year, increased healthcare demands and rising costs in utilities, consumables and mandatory staff wages.
We regret to announce we are no longer offering services we are not funded for:
All of these services are provided at hospitals via a number of different departments; we will refer patients requiring these tests to their consultant.
However, hospital consultant requested bloods we can't take can be taken at hospitals without the need for referral.
Please see details here of the local phlebotomy services for your hospital consultant bloods.
We are very sorry for the inconvenience that these changes may cause but hope you will understand that we have had to take these steps to protect the high quality of services we do receive funding for. Should funding and appointment capacity improve, we will reintroduce as many services as we can sustain.
British Medical Association Wales (BMA Wales) Save our Surgeries campaign
We are a friendly, caring, forward thinking and progressive training Practice, that has invested in building a strong multi-disciplinary team to care for you, our patients. Cutting services is NOT what we want to be doing.
So we support BMA Wales in its campaign to improve funding to maintain high Primary Care standards and prevent difficulties in retaining clinical and non-clinical staff, reducing services and longer waiting times for routine care.
More than 90% of contacts in NHS Wales are with General Practices.
In 2022-2023, General Practice received only 5.7% of the NHS expenditure budget.
This funding is also decreasing; in 2005 it was 8.7%, in 2018 was 7.3% and 2020 was 6.1%.
For more information about how the BMA General Practice Council Wales is fighting to increase General Practice funding and support continuity of patient care close to home, please see:
If you would like to help the campaign to restore Primary Care funding, you could write to your local Senedd Member, or Member of Parliament. Thank you for your support.
References:
BMA Wales, as above