Steve Field, the chief inspector of general practice at the Care Quality Commission (CQC) must apologise for unfairly attacking GPs, Maureen Baker, chair of the Royal College of GPs has urged.
Last weekend, Professor Field, a practising GP, told the Daily Mail: “I believe that we’ve failed as a profession.
“Sometimes we go into a surgery and it’s so bad we go to court the following day to close it down. As a practising GP, I’m quite ashamed that some of my colleagues are providing such poor care,” he added.
He continued: “In some practices there is no care, they’re absent. The practices are being run by a series of locums, with no leadership. I was shocked at how uncaring and poor some of the practices have been.”
Responding today, Baker said that his comments have “shattered the morale of the nation’s GPs, who are already at a low ebb after more than a decade of chronic underfunding”, and he has “lost the confidence of the profession”.
Field – a predecessor of Baker’s as RCGP chair – has undermined the authority of his role, and damaged the concept of regulation among family doctors, Baker said.
