BMA Scotland Summer Roadshows
Below is a direct excerpt from BMA Scotlands own blog. You can view the article directly here.
The weather has been very variable this summer, much like the fortunes of general practice over the years. Hopefully you are managing to squeeze in some holiday and rest, given the ongoing and relentlessly high workload for our under-resourced general practice.
I would like to take this opportunity to once again encourage you to adopt the BMA Safe Workload Guidance and Practice Profitability Guidance which have been created to help support you delivering sustainable healthcare to your patients. We know, however, that adopting these pieces of guidance will not reverse the substantial and for most of us growing mismatch of patient demand versus your practice’s capacity.
To try and tackle this mismatch, your BMA Scottish GP Committee (SGPC) negotiating team has continued to meet with Scottish Government officials over the past couple of months, in pursuit of £290 million additional investment for Full Funding Restoration (FFR) to correct historical underfunding. FFR is what your LMC representatives at SGPC have told us is required to stabilise the profession, and this was backed up by the Wellbeing and Funding survey which so many of you completed. By stabilise, we mean making the job better able to provide the safe high quality care for patients we all want to deliver. We mean making the role deliverable in a sustainable way by GPs and our staff, and so that newly qualified GPs can gain employment in a career that is sustainable for their working lives. And it is the Scottish Government’s failure to properly fund general practice, which makes FFR necessary, and the reason that we are now in formal dispute. Hopefully you read all about that in our last blog.
To keep you informed about progress regarding that dispute and next steps, SGPC are starting a series of roadshow events across Scotland. These will mostly be face to face events, where you can meet the SGPC leadership, network with colleagues, listen to a presentation from the SGPC team about where negotiations have got to, and have an opportunity to ask questions of us. On top of that, it also gives the SGPC leadership a chance to listen to your views, which will be especially important in the run-up to a ballot on industrial action later in the year, which will be the inevitable course of action if we do not see sufficient progress from the Scottish Government on meeting the profession’s clear demand for FFR. To effectively engage in industrial action, and to protect patients, it will be critical that practices are already following the BMA Safe Workload Guidance previously referenced.
Please do try to make it along to your nearest face to face roadshow. This really is your chance to help guide our way forward through what is an absolutely critical time for general practice in Scotland. If that is not practical for you, then there will be a virtual roadshow too, although this will be held last and the format inevitably means there will be less opportunity for you to interact with the SGPC leadership and GP colleagues at that event.
Dates and locations for the roadshows are below. The timing will be 7pm for a 7.30pm start, aiming to finish by 9.30pm. Venue details will be circulated nearer the time, as they are still in the process of being finalised. However, we are conscious that the dates are drawing closer, so we wanted to give you chance to get them in your (no doubt busy) diaries. As soon as we can get the venues confirmed we’ll let you know. The dates are as follows:
Thursday 21st August – Edinburgh
Wednesday 27th August – Inverness
Thursday 28th August – Glasgow
Tuesday 2nd September – Dundee
Wednesday 3rd September – Aberdeen
Thursday 4th September – online event.
I really hope you can make one of these events. Your input will help shape the course of events in the coming months, as we fight to protect patients and their GP Practices by regaining the appropriate resourcing of general practice.
Registration is straightforward – use the link here, and indicate which event you’d like to attend: https://events.bma.org.uk/gp-roadshows-scotland-2025/gproadshows
Dr Al Miles, Deputy Chair BMA Scottish GP Committee
