“The COVID19 crisis has the potential to change general practice dramatically and permanently,” representatives from the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP).
Writing in the British Journal of General Practice this week, Professor Martin Marshall, RCGP Chair of Council, and other senior RCGP representatives say some of the changes will be for the better and will speed up the implementation of reforms. However, they caution that others may have a detrimental impact on the established and often evidence-based features of general practice.
Before this crisis, more than 70 per cent of consultations were face to face, but this has dropped dramatically. Remote consultations, ranging from telephone to video, have become normalised almost overnight.
Furthermore, general practitioners have been more involved than ever before in other activities such as health planning, resource prioritisation and working with communities.
“We don’t yet know what effect this will have on personalised care and shared decision-making with patients,” they say.
The fundamental question for general practice now is how to retain the positive changes and discard those that could be damaging if maintained.
“Answering these questions will require urgent and wide engagement of frontline clinicians. It will also require exceptional leadership, a clear vision, and an ability to influence those who might prefer, by design or default, to stick with any damaging changes introduced during a crisis or to turn back the advantageous ones,” they say.
