qualified medical staff who are left without adequate supervision. tonight, we ask is patient safety being compromised? they re putting profits, money, ahead of quality of care. - that is a massive risk to patients. my name s jacqui wakefield and i m undercover at this london practice. it s run by a private company called operose health. operose has an estimated annual turnover of £88 million and is owned by a big american corporation. we re not naming this practice, or anyone who works here. it looks after around 20,000 patients. when phone lines open at 8am, dozens of patients wait in a queue to speak to me. 0perose health has grown rapidly in recent years. since 2016, it s spent millions buying gp practices across england. it now runs 70 surgeries with nearly 600,000 patients, making it the biggest gp provider to the nhs. panorama has spoken to a dozen former employees from across the 0perose group. one is a nurse who says she was sidelined in favour of lower paid, less q
who are left without adequate supervision. tonight, we ask is patient safety being compromised? they re putting profits, money, ahead of quality of care. - that is a massive risk to patients. i my name s jacqui wakefield and i m undercover at this london practice. it s run by a private company called operose health. operose has an estimated annual turnover of £88 million and is owned by a big american corporation. we re not naming this practice, or anyone who works here. it looks after around 20,000 patients. when phone lines open at 8am, dozens of patients wait in a queue to speak to me. a lot of my roles got taken away from me and given to healthcare assistants who had been trained up, not even healthcare assistants with a huge amount of clinical experience. i think the major risk by giving these tasks to people with less training and less knowledge is that they don t know what they don t know and that s when things get missed. this doctor says she left 0perose because of
it became harder for all of us to get face to face appointments with a gp. but when 0perose took over john s practice in 2020, he says things soon became worse. you won t get to talk to a doctor. you won t get an appointment with a doctor. there aren t the resources there to handle the face to face appointments that people really feel that they used to enjoy and now can t. nhs data shows that before 0perose took overjohn s practice, there was the equivalent of 25 full time doctors for around 42,000 patients. now, there s 11. when i think about what s next, i feel very concerned that we won t get the care that we need when we need it. 0perose says 97% of its practices are rated good or 0utstanding
i m quite horrified. you ve got 20,000 patients, and not a single doctor seeing patients. that s unbelievable and completely unsafe. what about in the context of there is a shortage of gps generally? is that an excuse? the general shortage of gps in the country absolutely no excuse. so, all of us in general practise have stressful days when we ve got doctors down or ill or off on holiday or whatever. we re used to that. 0perose says five doctors were working that day, but when we asked if the doctors were available for appointments, 0perose didn t respond. across the uk, there s a severe shortage of gps, but more are now being trained. panorama has analysed the most recent nhs data for 6,500 practices across england.
i m quite horrified. you ve got 20,000 patients, i and not a single doctor seeing patients. that s unbelievable - and completely unsafe. what about in the context of there is a shortage of gps generally? is that an excuse? the general shortage. of gps in the country absolutely no excuse. so, all of us in general- practise have stressful days when we ve got doctors down or ill or off on holiday- or whatever. we re used to that. 0perose says five doctors were working that day, but when we asked if the doctors were available for appointments, 0perose didn t respond. across the uk, there s a severe shortage of gps, but more are now being trained. panorama has analysed the most recent nhs data for 6,500 practices across england. we found for every 2,000 registered patients, there is, on average,