A party of GPs and healthcare industry leaders presented a 20,000-signature petition to Downing Street last week in a bid to halt the uncertainty of whether surgeries will close because of the removal of funding from them.

At a ‘Save our Surgeries’ rally, led by GPs from the at-risk Jubilee Street practice in East London, campaigners demanded that NHS England reversed the ‘dreadful decision’ to withdraw the Minimum Practice Income Guarantee (MPIG) and withhold the names of the 98 GP practices most at risk as a result.

The MPIG was introduced in 2004 to support some practices in the move to the new General Medical Services (GMS) contract. These practices would otherwise have lost substantial amounts of funding under the contract changes.

The campaigners also had the support of the British Medical Association (BMA), which has been calling for urgent support to help the adversely affected practices, many of which are in deprived or rural areas, since January.

A BMA spokesman addressed the rally and told the crowd that general practice needed long-term sustainable investment, which is the objective of its own ‘Your GP Cares’ campaign.

He added that GP practices have only got three-quarters of the funding that they used to have to be able to deliver the same services to their growing numbers of patients, who are often older, have more complex problems, who need to see their GPs and nurses more often, and who need the care that only their GPs and nurses can provide.

Apart from the East End, there are vulnerable practices in Cumbria, parts of Bristol and West Yorkshire and, in some cases, GPs have already handed back the keys to their practice to local clinical commissioning group and area teams because they cannot recruit GPs or make their practice sustainable.