The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) has warned that GP services are under so much pressure that A&E units are having to pick up the strain because patients cannot get appointments at surgeries.

According to the RCGP, patients will fail to get a GP appointment when they are unwell on more than 34 million occasions in England this year because funding cuts are affecting services.

The organisation’s chair, Dr Maureen Baker, added that GP practices are being brought to their knees by an unprecedented fall in money for healthcare in the community and rising demand for their services.

The RCGP said it had calculated the 34 million figure from data in the GP Patient Survey, which found that 10 per cent of patients who sought a consultation with a GP or practice nurse failed to get one. It allied this information with the fact that surgeries see patients for around 340 million appointments per year.

The professional body said that almost 11 per cent of the NHS budget was spent on general practice in 2005, compared with only 8.5 per cent in 2011, a cumulative loss of £9.1bn at the same time as 40 million additional appointments are being requested.

Meanwhile, according to the College, the average number of consultations carried out by each GP in England per year has increased by 1,450 since 2008 from 9,264 to 10,714.

However, the Department of Health accused the RCGP of using partial and conflated data and of confusing the number of people and consultations. A spokesman insisted that the GP survey showed that the vast majority of patients are satisfied with their GP and rated their experience of making an appointment as ‘good’,