‘Astonishing’ GP unemployment crisis still ongoing, warns BMA sessional committee chair
Exclusive GPs are still facing an ‘astonishing’ unemployment crisis, the new chair of the BMA’s sessional GP committee has warned – as she revealed that it took her three years to find a ‘very tiny’ salaried role due to the ongoing crisis.
Dr Lucy-Jane Davis, a GP who works in Devon and East Cornwall and was elected chair earlier this month, said that the committee is ‘still getting many reports’ of sessional GPs struggling to find work.
In an interview with Pulse, Dr Davis described the situation as ‘frankly astonishing’ and called on the Government to increase and ringfence funding specifically for GP employment.
Pulse started reporting on the crisis in 2023, when reports began to emerge about GPs being out of work, and then revealed the extent of it in 2024, when the then BMA’s GP committee chair Dr Katie Bramall said that general practice suddenly went from a recruitment to an employment crisis, driven by the Government’s squeeze of practice finances.
Pulse has reported extensively on a reduction in demand for locum posts since then, and on GPs having to drive across England, stay in hotels overnight and drive up to four hours on a daily basis to get locum work amid a shortage of shifts available.
The committee is now seeing an increase in fixed-term roles, which Dr Davis said could be due to practices’ ‘anxiety’ about future funding within the Government’s neighbourhood health model.
She said: ‘We are still getting many reports of GPs struggling to find enough work, which is incredible when you consider the need for GP care for patients.
‘We shouldn’t be having a situation where patients are waiting weeks and weeks and weeks to see a GP, and yet we have unemployed GPs or underemployed GPs.
‘There are more posts trickling through, but many of these are being offered on a fixed term basis presumably due to anxiety about recurrent funding, and this needs addressing as soon as possible.
‘More widely, having an underemployed GP workforce in the country at the moment is frankly astonishing and the Government needs to address this by improving sustainable, ringfenced funding to employ GPs.’
Dr Davis said she qualified in 2023 ‘straight into the GP underemployment crisis’ and has found the experience of finding work since then ‘disheartening’. As a parent carer, she said she was looking for mostly term-time work and a retainer post.
She told Pulse: ‘It’s been very difficult to find work. Fingers crossed, I’m starting a very tiny salaried job in the next few months, so that I have a base.
‘But it’s taken me three years to find a job, and it would be only two sessions a week term time, so it’s a very small sessional job.
‘Over the last three years, I have applied for posts within a one-hour drive of where I live and whilst I’ve had a fixed term post, I’ve not been able to secure anything substantive up to now.
‘Locum work has been very patchy, and it’s been very disheartening to start my GP career with so much uncertainty and rejection. We need to ensure all GPs are able to find sustainable, secure work where they are able to feel valued.’
Pulse has contacted the Department of Health and Social Care for comment.
Last year, Pulse looked into the unemployment crisis as part of a major series and white paper, which revealed that around a quarter of salaried GPs and locums were looking for a permanent role at the same time as practices facing a shortfall in GP numbers. The series looked at the extent of the problem and the reasons behind it.
