Domhnall MacAuley is a CMAJ Associate Editor and a professor of primary care in Northern Ireland, UK. He recently attended the Society for Academic Primary Care annual conference in Exeter, England.

Resources for primary care in the United Kingdom are under increasing pressure, as Dr. Jennifer Dixon, Chief Executive of the Health Foundation, outlined in her keynote address to the  Society for Academic Primary Care meeting in Exeter last week. A healthy growth in spending from about 1990 until 2008 was followed by a rather dismal change in the funding landscape: the proportion of overall health spending allocated to primary care gradually declined and has now been flat for the last 6 years at roughly 9%. Overall, however, spending on health as a percentage of GDP is about average within the EU and despite austerity policies, spending on health has been relatively well preserved compared to education, for example. When it comes to public satisfaction with primary care, the main problem mirrors what we see in Canada - access. ...continue reading →