The North West London NHS Integrated Care Board is ploughing ahead with drastic plans to cut off the majority of its 2.1 million patients from relationship with their GP Surgeries.

Only residents with ‘complex long-term conditions’ will be looked after by their own GP Surgery. Everyone else will be directed to "at-scale" area hubs where call handlers who are not doctors will assign you to a source of treatment.

The changes will impact everyone who uses the NHS who lives in the London boroughs of Harrow, Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea, Hammersmith & Fulham, Hounslow, Brent, Hillingdon, and Ealing.

The plans were announced in February 2024 and were originally intended to go in GP Surgery contracts from this April. Outcry from patients and doctors – including this petition – has forced the ICB to delay their plans for a year. But they are not changing their plan and are refusing to conduct any proper consultation. 

This petition calls on NWL ICB to stop these plans, and work instead with local people and GPs to preserve and strengthen GP Surgeries – rather than weakening and replacing them. 

The Londonwide GP body (the London Medical Council) remains deeply concerned by the planned changes:

• The scheme is not safe for patients. The person doing triage will not be a doctor but somebody with much lower qualifications and untrained in diagnostics.
• Most people will lose continuity of care with their family doctor, as they will be diverted away to faceless area hubs.
• GPs have had little or no say in this change; and patients have still not been told!

Only mass patient action can stop the end of the Family Doctor in North West London and the death of general practice as we know it. 

None of the 2.1 million residents of North West London have been asked whether they want these changes. 

To learn more about the issue, visit www.saveourfamilydoctors.org.uk.

(The Save Our Family Doctors campaign is supported by Hammersmith and Fulham Save Our NHS and a growing army of others.)