The Death of A Practice: How to Avoid Practice Failure

When a GP surgery "fails", the obituary is usually short: recruitment crisis, rising demand, funding cuts.But that is rarely the whole story.The Death of a Practice walks you through the post-mortem.Drawing on real cases from the consulting room, the partners' meeting and the courtroom, this book exposes how practices actually die: not in a single catastrophic event, but through a series of unnoticed decisions, blind spots and legal traps. CQC enforcement, NHS England investigations, partnership disputes, Performers List suspensions, locum dependence, opaque finances - each can be survivable on its own. Together, they can be terminal.Inside, you will find:¿ Practice Autopsies - step-by-step dissections of failing and failed surgeries: what went wrong, what was missed, and where the law quietly shifted the risk back onto partners.¿ Hidden Law - the "small print" of regulation, contracts and guidance that turns everyday decisions into existential threats for the practice.¿ Early Warning Signs - practical indicators that your practice is on a dangerous trajectory long before the headlines or the inspectors arrive.¿ Survival Strategies - clear, actionable ways to renegotiate risk, strengthen governance, and protect both the partnership and individual clinicians.Written by Dr Oluwatoyin Ogunsanya - Consultant Obstetrician & Gynaecologist turned GP Partner, and later Solicitor Advocate - this book combines clinical insight with legal expertise. It is for GPs, partners, practice managers, PCN leaders, medico-legal advisers and anyone who suspects that "business as usual" in general practice is more fragile than it looks.If you have ever sat in a partners' meeting with a knot in your stomach, wondering whether your practice will survive the next inspection, letter or complaint, Death of a Practice is your wake-up call - and your roadmap.Before your practice becomes a case study, read the autopsy.