Ministers must “radically” reform the way GP funding is allocated across the country because it results in the poorest areas receiving inadequate healthcare, family doctors have warned. The Royal College of GPs (RCGP) wrote in an open letter that the Carr-Hill formula, which has been used to allocated core GP funding since 2004, is outdated as it does not equitably distribute funds and as a result has contributed to the widening of health inequalities across the country. They said that the formula, which is used to determine how much money for each patient is allocated to each GP practice, does not adequately take into account deprivation levels of a local area.
Previous studies had found that for every 10% increase in a practice’s deprivation level, payments only increased by 0.06%. Furthermore, GP practices in areas with the highest levels of deprivation have on average 300 more patients for each GP than those in more affluent areas.
The letter, with its co-signatories including the Health Foundation, the NHS Confederation’s Primary Care Network, and the charity National Voices, added that typically, “practices in the areas of greatest deprivation have patients with more complex needs, yet don’t receive proportional funding to address those additional needs”. The letter comes after previous analysis by the Guardian revealed that areas across England where the highest proportion of ethnic minorities live have the poorest access to GPs, with experts having attri.
