AS THE CHAIR of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), Professor Kamila Hawthorne’s voice grows increasingly crucial as Britain grapples with the future of its healthcare system.
She is passionate about the role of GPs in patient care and as advocates for patients.
“General practice is the first port of call for the vast majority of patients in the NHS – and when it is properly resourced, it alleviates pressures right across the health service. It makes absolute sense to shift resources into primary care, where patients want to be cared for and where delivering care is most cost effective,” she said, while responding to Lord Darzi’s independent investigation of the NHS in England.
The landmark report revealed a stark reality: while GPs are increasingly expected to manage complex care coordination, they lack the resources, infrastructure, and authority to deliver it effectively.
Addressing the RCGP annual conference 2024 in Liverpool, she called out the “devastating inequalities,” warning that the rising patient per GP ratio means that patients in poorer areas – who tend to have more complex health issues – are less likely to receive the care they need as a result of decades of underfunding of the family doctor service.
“The most deprived areas have one fully qualified GP to cover 2,450 patients. That’s over 300 patients than in GP practices with the lowest level of income deprivation. And these are average figures,” she told the conference.
But it's not just about numbers for Hawthorne. After qualifying from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1984 and completing her GP training in Nottingham in 1988, she has spent 34 years as a GP, with 27 of those years serving communities in South Wales. Her research and clinical working interests have been in health inequalities and access to health services.
“I have worked in areas of high deprivation, and I know how poverty leads to health inequalities,” she has said. “As a country, we cannot allow such inequality of health provision to continue to grow.”
She warned that the crisis is exacting a heavy price from patients, pointing to dangerous trends like self-medication and the proliferation of unregulated online pharmacies. Recently, she raised alarm bells about people purchasing potentially unsafe weight-loss injections online, highlighting the risks of bypassing proper medical supervision.
Perhaps Hawthorne's most significant impact lies in her relentless exposure of the GP retention crisis. She points to a troubling arithmetic: GPs are handling substantially more appointments than five years ago, while their numbers continue to decline. “We're losing GPs faster than we can recruit them,” she observed, challenging the NHS to address this unsustainable trajectory.
Hawthorne was head of the graduate entry medicine programme at Swansea University and has a deep interest in medical education reform, emphasising the need for both clinical excellence and compassionate care.
She was awarded an MBE in 2017 for services to general practice.
