Lorna Cavanagh can name every doctor who has worked at the surgery in the Cornish fishing village of Mevagissey since 1944 – the year she was born. The 75-year-old describes calling a Dr Hannon at 2am when her sister-in-law was taken ill with kidney stones in the 1970s. “You could see him from our window coming down that hill on his moped,” she said. “It was a very personal service.”

Last month the well-respected partner of the local practice, Dr Katherine James, announced she would be handing back her contract to run the surgery on 31 July. NHS England says it is assessing the options available, but it is feared the much-loved community surgery could close and its 5,300 patients forced to use the infrequent and expensive bus service to travel elsewhere for treatment.

Faced with this prospect, the residents of Mevagissey, which is eight miles south of St Austell, the nearest medium-sized town, took matters into their own hands. The “Will you be my GP?” campaign – with its #willyoubemygp hashtag – aims to persuade doctors around the country that they should make the picturesque fishing village, with its narrow winding streets and superior fish and chips, their home. In a campaign video posted on the Cornwall Channel, a crowd of residents chant: “Be our GP. We are a lovely community. We need you.”

GP surgery closures across the UK have reached an all-time high, affecting an estimated half a million patients last year, research has found. An investigation by the medical website Pulse found 138 doctors’ premises shut their doors in 2018, compared with 18 in 2013.

GPs said under-resourcing and recruitment difficulties were forcing surgeries to close. They said many smaller practices were merging with others to survive, which allowed them to avoid having to disperse their patient list to other practices much further away.

Data released by 186 out of 217 clinical commissioning groups and health boards, following freedom of information requests, revealed that smaller surgeries – those serving 5,000 or fewer patients – were the worst affected in 2018, accounting for 86% of closures.

Pulse calculated that last year’s closures affected about 519,500 patients. Thirty-one of the 138 surgery closures in 2018 came as a result of mergers, the figures showed, which affected an estimated 161,126 patients.

Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said the figures were sad but unsurprising. “GPs and our teams are working to our absolute limits to provide safe, high-quality care, while general practice is under intense pressure, and this is resulting in some GPs leaving the profession, and in other cases forcing them to close their surgery doors,” she said.

The NHS could be short of almost 70,000 nurses within five years, according to a leaked copy of the government’s long-awaited plan to tackle the staffing crisis.

Blaming the government’s decision to abolish bursaries for nursing students, a draft of the NHS people plan says: “Our analysis shows a 40,000 (11%) shortfall [in the number of nurses needed in England] in 2018-19 which widens to 68,500 (16%) by 2023-24 without intervention, as demand for nurses grows faster than supply.”

That would mean that the NHS’s shortage of nurses increases from one in nine of the workforce to one in six, adding to the rising pressures on hospitals, GP surgeries and mental health care.

The report, seen by the Observer, makes clear that the shortage could be even higher than 68,500 because of “additional pressures” on GP surgeries, which are due to take on greater responsibilities for patient care over the next few years under the NHS long-term plan.

The document adds that even if its recommendations are implemented in full, the health service will still be short of 38,800 nurses by 2023-24, almost as many the current total of 40,000 vacancies. It says: “We believe we can reduce the gap between supply and demand to 38,800 (10%) in 2023-24, assuming that we are able to make progress on all of the interventions in this chapter.”

The exodus, uncovered by Labour MP Frank Field, is exacerbating the existing “under-doctoring” of deprived populations – the lack of family doctors in places where poorer people live.

Experts said the widening divide between rich and poor areas in GP numbers – which is one of England’s starkest health inequalities – would force the least well-off to wait longer for an appointment, even though they are generally sicker and die earlier than the rest of the population.

“A decade ago the country was beginning to make some serious inroads into the under-doctoring of the poorest areas. What these grim figures show is that in recent years that progress has not only stalled, but actually gone into reverse,” Field told the Observer.

“The most worrying trend here is the number of GPs ceasing to serve people towards the bottom of the pile, while at the same time people in the wealthiest areas have benefited from an even better service. Vulnerable people are having to suffer in silence without being able to see a GP.

“Here’s another example of everything going in the wrong direction if our goal is to equalise health opportunities and outcomes. It is a new appalling face of inequality in modern Britain.”

There were 8,207 GPs working in areas containing the most deprived quintile of the population in England in 2008. But by last year that number had fallen to 7,696 – a drop of 511 – according to the response to a written parliamentary question Field asked recently.

But over the same decade the number of family doctors working in the most prosperous fifth of the population increased from 4,058 to 4,192 – a rise of 134, public health minister Steve Brine told Field.

Thousands more overseas doctors will be able to come and work in the NHS after Theresa May heeded pleas from cabinet colleagues to scrap limits that hospital bosses had criticised as “absolutely barmy”.

The relaxation of immigration rules, which is due to be announced imminently, represents a victory for Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid and follows a vociferous campaign by NHS organisations and medical groups.

They have been arguing that medics should be taken out of the cap on skilled workers allowed to work in Britain, in order to help tackle the NHS’s deepening workforce crisis.

Hunt, the health and social care secretary, and Javid, the home secretary, have been privately lobbying the prime minister to ease restrictions that between November and April denied more than 2,300 doctors from outside the European Economic Area the chance to work in the NHS.

Under the current immigration system the number of non-EEA skilled workers of all sorts able to come and work in Britain on a tier-2 visa through a certificate of sponsorship is capped at 20,700 a year – a ceiling set by the Home Office.

However, the government has decided that the NHS’s need for more doctors is so great that they should be treated differently, well-placed sources have told the Guardian. The rethink should mean that doctors are no longer left unable to take up job offers from hospitals and GP surgeries because they cannot get a visa.

There will now be a separate system to decide which medics come.

Recent official figures show that the NHS in England alone is short of 9,982 doctors. Those refused tier-2 visas in recent months have included GPs, psychiatrists and cancer specialists, all of which have a significant number of vacancies.

Public satisfaction with GP services in Great Britain has dropped significantly in the last year, to the lowest level on record.

The National Centre for Social Research’s British Social Attitudes survey saw a seven percentage point decline in the proportion of people who are satisfied with GP services.

The survey, of over 3,000 adults in England Scotland and Wales, found that only 65% were satisfied with GP services in 2017, compared with 72% in 2016.

This is the ‘lowest level of satisfaction with GP services since the survey began in 1983 and the first time that general practice has not been the highest rated service’, the report said.

The percentage of people who were dissatisfied with GP services reached an all-time high, jumping by six percentage points to 23%.

The research, carried out by the Nuffield Trust and The King’s Fund think tanks, also revealed a six percentage point drop in public satisfaction with the NHS as a whole.

The four main causes of dissatisfaction were staff shortages, long waiting times, lack of funding and government reforms.

The top four causes of satisfaction were quality of care, attitudes and behaviour of NHS staff, the range of services and treatments on offer and that the NHS is free at the point of delivery.

A poll of 15,560 GPs by the British Medical Association (BMA) has found that 34% intend to stop working by 2020, with many others going part-time, moving abroad or even abandoning medicine altogether.

The findings thrust the issue of GP numbers into the election spotlight as the BMA accused the political parties of making “absurd” promises to tackle what it called a “crisis” and of ignoring the reasons why NHS general practice is facing a worsening shortage of medics.

Family doctors will offer advice over the internet and open for longer hours, seven days a week, to help ease the pressure on struggling A&E departments, David Cameron has said.

The prime minister said he would like GP surgeries to open from 8am until 8pm and over the weekends to fit in with the lifestyles of working people. He said a £50m pilot scheme would be rolled out across the country.

“I think it is the right approach to look at this because obviously our accident and emergency departments do a brilliant job but they do have four million more people going through them than was the case in 2004,” he told ITV’s Daybreak.

“A lot of people going to accident and emergency really need a GP rather than accident and emergency, so I think this pilot scheme … is a very good step forward.”