Creating 500 new fully staffed Walk-in centres across England would relieve the burden on GP services and hospitals enormously. Walk-in centres are hugely popular among local residents and ensuring approximately one additional centre for every 100,000 residents in England would go a long way to solving waiting lists. The centres would deal with minor injuries, prescriptions, basic illnesses, vaccinations, blood tests etc.
In order to do this, I estimate you would need to recruit 7500 new GP’s and 7500 new nurses, as well as hiring administrative staff for the centres. You would also need initial capital spending to build the centres, most likely at existing hospital or medical sites.
The breakdown of requirements I believe would be as follows:
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£500 million in initial, one-off capital spending (£1 million to create each walk-in centre)
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3 doctors, 3 nurses and 2 administrative staff at any given time in each centre, meaning
16 Doctors per centre (working in shifts at 40 hours per week) earning on average £100,000 p/a
16 Nurses per centre (working in shifts at 40 hours per week) earning on average £35,000 p/a
12 administrative staff (working in shifts at 40 hours per week) earning on average £35,000 p/a
Plus costs for supplies, I estimate the total at being between £3 - 3.5 million per centre per year.
This would cost between £1.5 and £1.75 billion per year in total for the centres, plus the initial £500 million capital spending of establishing each centre.
I believe this could easily be achieved by reducing foreign aid spending by £2 billion per year.
In addition, remove the cap on placement for medical students in the UK, offer to write off NHS medical staff student loans pro-rata if they work in the NHS for 10 years.
In conclusion, I believe such a move, when paired with other schemes such as Reform UK’s patient voucher scheme, would go a long way towards reducing the enormous backlog of NHS waiting lists.
