Northern Ireland GPs are gearing up for another highly challenging winter period for our health and social care services.
While there are ongoing pressures across the system all year, more people become sicker, for longer, over the winter months, particularly those in our older population.
Last month, the Department of Health announced a series of initiatives in a 2024/25 Winter Preparedness Plan as officials warned that they will not eliminate winter pressures on the Health and Social Care (HSC) system but will help to alleviate their impact.
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They include additional funding for GP and residential care homes, phone first services for all NI health trusts and vaccination programmes.
Announcing the measures, Stormont's Health Minister Mike Nesbitt said there's no doubt that the HSC system is again facing a very difficult winter period.
Ahead of another highly challenging season for healthcare, people are being urged to familiarise themselves with health services ahead of increased pressure on hospitals at this time of year.
We spoke to Dr Ursula Mason, a GP based in Carryduff and Chair of the Royal College of GPs NI, about planning for this busy time of year and how people can best look after themselves to ease pressure on the system by accessing the right service at the right time.
Dr Mason told Belfast Live: "I think anyone working in the health service always views winter with a bit of trepidation. We have a very challenging situation at the best of times in Northern Ireland from the perspective of our health service.
"When you add on the additional winter pressures that inevitably come every year, it does put the whole system under a huge amount of pressure and we see that really acutely at the coalface here in general practice."
An extra £3.4million is being made available to help GP services meet additional winter demand as Dr Mason explained: "What the extra funding does is it creates a little bit of space and a little bit of extra resource to add in additional surgeries and additional sessions in GP practices up and down the country.
"There are a couple of issues with that. Number one not all practices can utilise the funding because they can't necessarily always access additional help and support from GPs because there are fewer GPs around.
"It's sometimes hard to get locum GPs into areas where it's hard to recruit so that can be a challenge for some practices.
"And of course, there's always a huge issue with access anyway so the amount of money that is provided every year to GPs, while it's welcome, it really is a drop in the ocean when it comes down to the need that's out there in the community.
"While we welcome it and utilise it, we could absolutely do with more funding if it were available this time of the year."
Dr Mason says the demand for appointments does escalate at this time of year: "There's no doubt about it when you see sort of the winter viruses that are starting to take hold at the moment and also just general ill health.
"We've got lots and lots of people who require our services every day of the week, whether they've got something acute or whether it's a chronic long term condition.
"We have a huge demand, which we try to meet as best we can, like every other practice up and down the country but we know that the capacity in general practice is not sufficient to meet the demand that's out there in our communities."
NHS leaders have already sounded the alarm over a “quad-demic” of disease, saying the service is “busier than ever” for this time of year, amid rising cases of flu, Covid-19, norovirus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
"There's certainly been an uptick in respiratory viruses, right across our community here and we've seen that through our day to day pressures in terms of requests for appointments and assessments," Dr Mason said.
"There's a lot of information out there online on how to deal with those common conditions.
"If you are an individual who's a wee bit more at risk or a bit more vulnerable, either because of your age or because of other conditions, it's often important to talk to a health professional either a pharmacist or a GP just to get some extra advice about how you're managing and the best things that you can do to help support your well-being and getting better from those kind of infections."
Video by Belfast Live videographer Harry Bateman.
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