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GP leaders vote against moving towards 9am-5pm core hours

GP leaders vote against moving towards 9am-5pm core hours

Local GP leaders have voted against changing core working hours to 9am to 5pm following a lively debate at the UK LMCs Conference in York today.

The motion, proposed by Avon LMC, said ‘urgent action should be taken to manage the workload / workforce mismatch within general practice’, adding that it ‘demands that the core GP contracts be reduced to the hours of 09.00 to 17.00’.

The motion was lost, with 61% voting against, 35% voting for and 4% abstaining.

Delegates in York said that the current workload is ‘intolerable’, but there was concern from a number of speakers about pushing for definitive working hours and how it could hamper contract negotiations.

Earlier, delegates voted in favour of the BMA GP Committee ‘renegotiat[ing] the GMS contracts with workload limits in order to protect all general practice staff and patients’.

Ahead of conference, the motion drew much controversy, with a Daily Mail front page proclaiming ‘Now GPs want to work even less!’ following the publishing of the agenda.

Proposing the motion, Dr Shaba Nabi, a GP in Bristol and a Pulse columnist, said: ‘Our hours are at odds with family life.’

Dr Nabi said: ‘The outrage and the reactions to this motion just goes to show how gaslit we are as a profession, that we have internalised the belief that we are worthless, of no value and we should be working 12 and a half hours more than everyone else. 

‘This motion does not deny access to urgent care – the excellent out-of-hours service has and always will be there to provide care for GP out of hours – and neither does this motion deny access to routine care in the evenings or the weekends because this needs to be commissioned separately from the core contract for GPs who wish to deliver this.

‘This motion will not deny patient access to GP care, but what it will do is keep patients safer.’

‘Our hours are completely at odds with any sort of family life so we continue haemorrhaging the GP workforce and do nothing about it.’

Dr Catherine Chapman, from North Yorkshire LMC, spoke against the motion, stating: ‘There is no doubt in any of our minds that our current workload and patient expectations are unsustainable but I don’t think reducing the core hours will improve this. Instead, we need to work smarter and more flexibly.’

She suggested moving away from standard morning and afternoon sessions to early morning clinics, starting after the school run or running clinics across the standard lunchtime hours.

She added that reducing core hours would ‘exacerbate health inequalities’ and ‘put even more pressure on estates that are already beyond stretched’.

Dr Emeline Dean, from Somerset LMC, said: ‘Changing opening hours is very confusing for the public whom we serve and doesn’t help us with support for our cause of safe, resilient general practice in the general media.

‘What we need is less work, not [fewer] hours to do the same amount of work in.’

Dr Zishan Syed, from Kent LMC and a member of GPC England, said the motion would be a ‘good protest motion…particularly in England’. He added: ‘We are being encouraged to approach the model of seven-day working eight to eight and that’s occurring through the trojan horse of the PCN DES.’

He added: ‘Our GMS contract is out of control and outdated – it is not fit for 2022. We need to send a clear signal to our leadership, that the present hours are unsafe. Use this motion to send a powerful signal to the Government that we oppose their plans for seven-day working, eight to eight, send a powerful message to our leaders – especially those in England – to make it absolutely clear to them to resist the weekend working that is being introduced in the PCN DES.’

More to follow


          

READERS' COMMENTS [7]

Please note, only GPs are permitted to add comments to articles

Kevlar Cardie 10 May, 2022 12:45 pm

If a family doctor was filmed live on Sky news walking on the river Thames outside parliament the headline in the Daily Flail would be ” GP can’t swim”.

Stop pandering to them , they don’t give a monkey’s chuff.

Grow a pair.

Patrufini Duffy 10 May, 2022 1:25 pm

The good-doers. You know the type – they like to sign-up, spend hours reflecting on their portfolios and then complain that they’re too busy. They love a follow-up and generating meaningless work and hypothesis which eventually ends up in zero. They used to be called Tree Huggers in medical school for a reason. And 20 years on – they’re hugging onto hope and “being there” for others and the UK public in 2022. For essentially a free walk over. The PCN-DES will soon bite, they’ll have to realise the hard way that their herding is penned with electric fencing.

Bonglim Bong 10 May, 2022 6:04 pm

Having been met with loads of headlines when this was suggested – can we expect even more headlines now that the vote has taken place?

I think not.

Vinci Ho 10 May, 2022 11:15 pm

For all my love of general practice (and Pulse) , I can only say ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ on this matter .
For those who are holding the opposing arguments in this motion , please find your introspection to remember why we have to come to this . The existence of this motion is a hallmark in our history . Remember who is our real enemy ? The result of the motion is actually inextricable but also understandable. The battle, however , must go on but we must fight a ‘smart’ battle , even though the odds are well against us( all of us). ‘Divide and conquer’ is simply becoming a cliche now because our enemy would not care less and believe we are well submissive and even obsequious under ‘command and control’ .
I apologise if you think I don’t quite make sense as I am still struggling to recover from my burnout syndrome after more than three months …………
The force may be weak , but the force is still there being with us …………

J A 10 May, 2022 11:38 pm

Ridiculous this fear about ‘losing the media’, which is always a fickle beast to chase. They will never side with those fighting on the frontline for primary care; GPs are public enemy number one when it suits and sells.

Focus on protecting an exhausted workforce to optimise our resources and be damned with the optics. Let the rags print whatever they want, let people rant and rave on social media, let the public strop about GPs. We need to get on with the job of delivering care by retaining what’s left of a tank running on fumes and fight hard to do so.

Simon Gilbert 11 May, 2022 9:31 am

9-5 opening would require only seeing patients in the morning in order to do all the other externally generated work all afternoon.

Rogue 1 27 May, 2022 5:31 pm

Unfortunately the people making the decisions don’t actually do the job (or maybe only 1-2 sessions a week), so it doesn’t affect them
They need to get a back bone and stand up for primary, not just bide their time til they can stand up for a gong!