The NHS in England lost a further 77 GPs last month, the latest statistics have shown, and close to 500 in the year to November.
Since 2015, when the Government pledged to hire 5,000 additional GPs, 1,900 full-time-equivalent GPs have been lost from the NHS and nearly a quarter of these – 471 – left in the last year.
Today’s workforce data ‘are another illustration of an alarming long-term and continuing trend that is seeing a haemorrhage of GPs from practices in England’, the chair of BMA England’s GP Committee said.
‘Despite promises to recruit 5,000 – and then 6,000 – more GPs, the Government has now overseen the loss of the equivalent of more than 1,900 full-time fully-qualified GPs in England since 2015.
‘That almost a quarter of this loss happened in the last 12 months alone – the biggest annual fall in almost three-and-a-half years – speaks volumes to the intense pressures that practices and staff are under,’ Dr Kieran Sharrock said.
He pointed to specific drivers including soaring workload demands, financial pressures ‘bearing down on practices’ and ‘the impact of punitive pension rules’, which together mean ‘many GPs are having to take the difficult to decision to reduce their hours or leave altogether to protect their wellbeing’.
Dr Sharrock added: ‘Rather than piling on more pressure, Government needs to show it is taking this dire workforce situation seriously and take steps to support practices, giving them the help they need to safely continue caring for patients, and in doing so encouraging more family doctors to stay in the profession when our communities need them most.’
Earlier this week, Dr Sharrock said NHS England must scrap its plans to list the highest-earning GPs by name, as this will further drive doctors out of the profession.
NHS England plans for GP partners, salaried and locum GPs to self-declare any earnings above £156,000 from May, according to draft guidance seen by Pulse.
It comes as GPs are currently reporting ‘unmanageable’ workloads, driven by rising rates of respiratory infections and the UK Health Security Agency’s alert to parents to be vigilant for symptoms of strep A.
Meanwhile, amid recruitment woes, one Cumbria practice now has over 7,000 registered patients per GP.
GPs dont strike, with an ineffectual union the walk or just dont do the Job.Out in 12 months.(yipee)
Yep, and an irreplaceable amount of experience!
This is the beginning of a landslide coming.
There is a complete failure to recognise that the expected system of 1 retiring GP to be replaced by 1 coming in – is completely outdated.
The change to the 40 hour contract for training doctors has eroded the work until you drop generations, and most qualifying doctors have no plans to work in primary care full time – and many planning to leave profession before they start, work abroad, be full time parents etc, from recent estimates I believe it is closer to 2 out 3 in – to hold still with GP numbers.
You would need to double GP training posts, and massively increase medical school numbers to cope. But with 5 years to complete medical school, and 5 years post graduate training minimum to be a GP – any change will need 10 years to filter through.
Labour are making noises to increase medical school places, but are their plans fit for purpose with such large increases needed to maintain a UK trained workforce.
The workforce needs to increase in nursing/midwifery and allied colleagues, and current funding taking away nurses bursaries, and the current pay disputes are doing nothing to encourage recruitment and retention.
Change needed urgently before many at the older end burn out and leave a gaping hole in provision, so private companies come in and swoop to care for those with money, leaving the young, poor, rural and old without care
Losing 500 seems a bit more than careless!
They think the 16-18 year olds of this new world are going sell themselves into public service for nothing. How myopic.
It’s all very well increasing the flow into the bath by increasing medical school places, but when will our ‘leaders’ realise you have to also put the lug in the bath and stop the exodus of experienced GPs at the other end.
Why anyone would want to be an NHS GP in this day and age escapes me
Multiple reasons to leave early, but a special mention for our friends in the RCGP and their loyal support for Appraisal and Revalidation.
75% of population of Canada is not registered with any GP. The lists are full and simply closed to new registrations. A little bit like dentists’ lists over here.
RCGP and BMA are equally complicit and living in ancient history with no real drive for improvement. Just happy to take the money and carry on in blissful ignorance pretending all is well.
Change is needed now, not tomorrow.
I don’t disagree change is needed but asking for change always strikes me as be careful what you wish for. Whilst there are disadvantages as a partner with a contract solely with one rather dysfunctional contract holder there are advantages. Encouraging us oldies to keep working seems to be bottom of their list. So some of what needs fixing is treasury not nhs management. Pension taxation needs reforming as it is penalising actually working especially Dr level income in combination with the complex pension scheme. If AA was just based on contributions life would be simpler. LTA also sets a rather fixed point to retire. 60% tax between 100-125k also dissuades from hard work. Why Mr Hunt didn’t just bring 45% down to £100k and simplify things making tax progressive rather than a punitive band that again seems to affect Drs disproportionately.
Relicensing and appraisal is another reason making winding down gently whilst still making a useful contribution more difficult. If you can ditch it in a pandemic and just stick people back on the register it suggests to me it has little point. I have seen estimates of it costing £3 billion a year. But people will not want to have to do front line jobs if you remove these, might I suggest cushy, desk roles.
But adequate staffing reduces individual pressure and may keep people working if the workload stresses were sustainable which they are quite clearly not currently.
For all management they need to realise and show that the clinical staff delivering patient care are valued and important and people are the frontline services. The NHS should revolve around making the delivery of care easier not harder.
They dont value frontline staff.Hence the ongoing public sector strikes.They want a smaller state even if the punters pay for that.
The lack of government action over this exodus is proof that they don’t see doctors as the future of Primary Care.
The old partnership model (with lots of independently minded guideline-ignoring expensive GPs plus the odd nurse) is inexorably moving to a plethora of guideline-following controllable cheaper noctor drones overseen by the occasional salaried doctor in a Practice preferably run by a Trust or a large business empire.
Naturally the Public hasn’t been informed of this transformation as they would be up in arms, but increasingly they’re waking up to reality, and now it’s too late to reverse the damage.
But the real genius is how the patients have been brainwashed into blaming all this undesired revolutionary change on greedy lazy GPs.
Totally agree with you David Banner
Spot on DB.
This has gone past the point of no return now. The exodus is self-perpetuating and reinforcing – it’s a domino effect. Thanks to GMC, CQC, A&R, NHSE, HMG, media et al, we will shortly have no primary care – at least not one we would recognise. The plans are to move to a hub and spoke model with primary care being a perfunctory, episodic slimmed down kind of triage service with the only strand of continuity being the EMR (good luck with that one!).
They wanted this. The health system will collapse. GMC, Taxation, punitive rules from NHSE. The NHS used to be good without so many rules and micro-management. Good luck if anyone falls ill. Good thing we still have our unwritten rules.
Through a friend, I met the senior health reporter on a national news network – a few years ago now. I wanted to make him aware of the incipient plight of primary care. And I gave him everything I could.
His response? “The people I’m talking to reckon we could do without general practice.” I was incredulous at the time. But obviously he was very well informed.
BMA and RCGP are fixated on the survival of the NHS, a ghastly increasingly unaffordable bureaucracy well past it’s best before date that inevitably treats employees badly and customers worse, rather than the survival of GP.
The public have been trained to believe that they are entitled to care paid for by someone else and with no idea of how expensive healthcare is.
Difficult to see this ending well.
@Long Gone: No-one cares. That’s it. I think it has to break and then be missed and then be valued. It’s all about re-defining society’s priorities in this “comfort democracy” . Primary Care sees 1 million people a day in the UK: that’s the truth of our value. If we are willing to take a risk with our (withering) pension we should just sit this one out. My accountant straightened me out on the pension question: a good pension from an under-earning job is not as good as a bad pension from a high-earning job. Mmmm.
““The people I’m talking to reckon we could do without general practice.” I was incredulous at the time. But obviously he was very well informed.” Informed on policy perhaps but not by evidence. We have all seen a cardiologist struggle with a rash and a dermatologist struggle with ankle swelling. Secondary care would crash in 24h. That would be morbid fun to watch. Kiss my *ss.
I retired yesterday after 41 years as a doctor. The system is broken. The dike is about to collapse and just putting fingers in will not stop it. Governments (of all kinds) have been warned about potential workforce issues for decades but have always kicked the can down the road. No party dares to deal with the issues. Money is poured in but will never keep up with demographic change, expense of more and more sophisticated procedures medication and increased expectation. Can the.NHS afford for everyone to have Ferraris when the country can only afford Fords?