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.