Patients registered with an east Suffolk GP practice may be asked to access healthcare elsewhere as the surgery battles "extraordinary pressure" and a lack of government funding.

Partners at Cutlers Hill Surgery in Halesworth has released a statement asking that patients with minor conditions may need to visit a pharmacy for assessment, while acute eye conditions can be seen by the Urgent Eye Care Service.

The statement, signed by the surgery's partners, added that Cutlers Hill was working with other practices to offer telephone and face-to-face appointments in the evenings and at weekends at a surgery serving Beccles and Bungay.

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The message also invited the public to contact the "politicians that control general practice funding" if they were concerned, adding that "we are in an election year".

Funding for general practice represented just 6% of the overall NHS spend, the surgery said, while 90% of all NHS patients first made contact with general practice and 80% of all emergency care.

The financial support received by surgeries was an average of £107.57 per registered patient per year, which the Cutlers partners said "did not get near to covering our costs".

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Alongside this were spiralling energy and staffing costs, the statement said.

It added: "All our staff are working extremely hard to provide the best level of care they can for you. We cannot work any harder.

"The current financial pressures and change in staffing levels mean that we will not always be able to offer the same level of service you are used to.

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"We can only afford to offer the level of service we are funded for," the partners said.

They also urged patients to "self-manage minor illness".

"We are doing everything we can to try and minimise the impact on the services we offer.  We are looking at different ways of delivering services so that you can still access good quality care with us," the statement added.