WHAT IS THE GP CRISIS?
The UK's GP crisis is an ongoing issue in which family doctors are struggling to cope with workloads getting bigger while the number of staff is shrinking.
A record 138 surgeries closed down in England last year, at a rate of two per week, affecting more than 500,000 patients.
The population of the UK is growing gradually older as people live longer, and there are more and more people living for a long-time with complex health conditions.
These are ones which require ongoing medical care like diabetes, heart disease or dementia – and many people have more than one.
GPs are also leaving the profession faster than they're joining it, meaning the growing workloads don't have a growing workforce to pick them up.
Figures in May showed there are 28,697 fully-qualified GPs working in England, down from 29,379 in 2016.
Since March 2016 – the first year after the Government promised to hire 5,000 extra GPs by 2020 – the total number of has dropped by 682.
Data for the first three months of this year showed waiting times are getting longer, too.
The number of people waiting more than two weeks to see their GP in England shot up to 12.3million this year, a 14 per cent rise from the 10.8million during the same period last year, and representing one in six patients overall.
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