Helen Salisbury: Pharmacy First and the new GP contract offer—moving deck chairs on the Titanic

Finance isn’t really my specialty, but even I can work out that an uplift of 1.9% to the value of the GP contract for 2024-25 won’t cover the bills. Katie Bramall-Stainer, chair of the BMA’s GP Committee for England, has described the offer as “grossly inadequate”1—to which I’d add derisory, insulting, and other less printable adjectives.The living wage has rightly been increased by 9.8%, general inflation is running at 4%, and energy prices have doubled in the past three years, making it hard not see this offer of 1.9% as evidence that the government actually wants general practice to fail.2 Unsurprisingly, practices are struggling to make ends meet, and many have given up and handed back their contract or are planning to do so within two years.34We’re told that there’s no money, so in this context it was interesting to hear about the Pharmacy First scheme. Under this programme, pharmacists…
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