Newly-qualified salaried GPs working 13-hour days, warns BMA campaign
Newly-qualified salaried GPs feel they have ‘no choice’ but to work 13-hour days, a new BMA campaign has claimed.
The BMA sessional GPs committee’s newly-launched ‘Know Your Rights’ campaign features a video in which a GP makes the claim.
The GP said: ‘I hear from a lot of newly-qualified salaried GPs who feel they have no choice but to do those 12, 13 hour days.
‘I try and empower them and say “your contract and job plans say that that’s not what you should be doing”, but they don’t want to make a fuss. They just feel grateful to have a job. But I can see them slowly burning out.’
Campaign literature reminds GPs of entitlements under the salaried GP model contract, which include:
- Receiving the DDRB pay uplift each year;
- 204 hours of CPD per year on an annualised basis;
- Continuous NHS service recorded from your original NHS start date, provided there hasn’t been a break of more than three months.
It asks sessional GPs to ‘ask why’ if their contracts do not include these provisions.
It comes as the committee announced it had elected locum GP Dr Lucy-Jane Davis to be its new chair.
New sessional GP committee chair Dr Davis, who works in Devon and East Cornwall, has taken over as committee chair from outgoing co-chairs Dr Amy Small and Dr Kim Rollinson.
Dr Davis said she would aim to tackle challenges faced by sessional GPs including ‘lack of employment’ and ‘huge variability of how the model contract works in practice’.
She added: ‘The next few years are likely to bring significant changes to the GP landscape, with large private companies stepping in to provide more services, including the likely neighbourhood structures.
‘Whilst there is much we still don’t know about how these services will be delivered, the one thing that remains certain is that I will fight to protect the rights of members and improve our pay and working conditions, whoever their employer may be, now and in the future. Whatever shape general practice takes, the committee’s job remains exactly the same: to make sure sessional GPs get the best possible deal’, she said.
Last week the BMA’s GP Committee for England elected three GP partners – Dr David Wrigley, Dr Shan Hussain and Dr Manu Agrawal – as deputy chairs. This followed the election of Dr Clare Bannon, a GP partner in Barnsley and former deputy chair of the GPC, as the new chair of the committee.
