GMC chief ‘worried’ about retention but unsure if overall GP numbers should increase
There needs to be a focus on solving the problems with retaining GPs in the workforce, GMC chief executive Charlie Massey has told MPs.
However, giving evidence to the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee on Wednesday this week, Mr Massey would not commit to the premise that GP numbers need to grow.
Committee member Dr Beccy Cooper asked if it was ‘fair’, based on the expectation on GPs to take a lead role in the shift of care from hospitals to neighbourhoods, to ‘say there should be more GPs in primary care’.
To which Mr Massey said: ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that, because it’s about a much broader workforce that work within primary care.
‘Primary care now looks very different than it did a decade ago in terms of the range of healthcare professionals, so I think it would be wrong, even though I’m the regulator of doctors, to say “the answer is X-thousand more GPs”’.
Prompted again to respond, he said while ‘successive governments’ had increased GP training places, it was issues of GP attrition and retention ‘at the other end’ that needed to be fixed.
He said: ‘I think the problem is the leaky bucket at the other end. The problem we’ve got is that the kind of workforce pressures we’ve been discussing and the wellbeing issues and burnout is driving too many GPs out of practice the other end.’
The regulator’s 2025 workforce report found 44% of GPs struggled with their workload compared with just 29% of respondents overall, making them the worst-affected specialty among all doctor groups.
Referencing that data, Mr Massey said he was ‘worried that general practice has consistently come out of our data as one of the most hard-pressed specialties’.
In 2017, the previous Government introduced the National GP Retention Scheme, which provides additional funding to GPs considering leaving the profession. However, as of October 2024, only 289 GP retainees were practising in England.
The BMA and RCGP have both called for a national retention strategy for GPs in England. The BMA said this could come with a commitment to ‘reducing social inequity, increasing continuity of care, and reducing the GP to patient list size ratio’. The RCGP has said this needs to form part of the updated long-term workforce plan.
New NHS England figures show there were 38,220 full-time equivalent (FTE) GPs in England at the end of 2025, including 28,777 FTE fully qualified GPs.
The health select committee evidence session also saw Mr Massey reveal that nearly 4,000 physician associates have now registered with the GMC; and that legislation which will enable their renaming to physician assistants is due by the end of the year.
The legislation will also quash the GMC’s powers to appeal MPTS fitness-to-practise rulings; and enable it to exercise more discretion to avoid launching unnecessary FTP tribunals.
It comes as Pulse this week exclusively revealed the GMC has appealed MPT decisions related to 60 doctors since it was given the power to do so in 2016 – a third of which (20) have involved GPs.
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READERS' COMMENTS [12]
Please note, only GPs are permitted to add comments to articles
the reason GPs are burnt out is due to a combination of too few GPs and an ever increasing patient demand. We need more GPs
Retiring soon age 55. I have truly challenged my own thinking but the more i reflected the more certain i have become . Part of the reason is because of the soleless nature of the job. 15 years ago it would’ve been hard to imagine how thy could make the job even crappier, but the explosion of non doctor grade clinical and sometimes non clinical staff making decisions about treatment that i then have to endorse even though I have never met them. I spend a lot of my day in a room on my own at a desk reviewing blood tests I did not ask for and issuing prescriptions i did not initiate on patients i have never met.
Yes Mr Massey. attitudes like yours are why people retire early. The buck has to stop somewhere, and where will the be when we have retired?
Recent headlines have commented that A&E waiting times were better during the junior doctors strike due to people being seen by experienced clinicians who were making full decisions. We seem to have spent the last few (many) years dumbing down primary care. I would include telephone/online triage in this as well as multiple grades of staff with different experience and GPs only dealing with one problem per consultation. I understand staffing and time play an important role here but I am concerned at times that we have been good at increasing churn of minor illness at the expense of those with more complex needs.
There are plenty of GP’s out there who would work but can’t get a job for many and various reasons
My long term locum job finished 16 months ago due to the practice employing 6 ARRS doctors making my role pretty much redundant. I had been a partner for 30 years in a busy inner city practice . We closed the practice due to financial pressures and the workload which was killing us . I was then a locum for the last 10 years which included 5 years as a prison Gp . Now having been more or less retired for 16 months I am very happy with my life . Sometimes it’s important to stop working and give yourself time to. The more I read about how general practice is now the more I am happy to be free to do what I want within reason ! Fed up GP you will enjoy retirement at 55 but see if there is something you can do even a day or two a week to get back and enjoy medicine at your own pace .I have loved being a Doctor and was probably practising in the golden age . There is a great life after work however
Opining that we don’t need more GPs at least helps to identify ‘leaders’ unfit to comment. It’s not GMC’s role anyway to influence workforce strategy; would that he could appropriately regulate the remit that he does have. He of the dumbing-down brigade.
It’s not Massey’s job to speak on workforce numbers, even if the question is planted by a Labour MP. Besides, the problem’s not a leaky bucket but rather that Massey’s Labour Govt masters haven’t turned on the tap. While at the same time they’ve been giving the bucket a right old, fragmenting, “private” kicking.
Primary care has lost its way, not because of the vision of the workforce but the lack of a vision by its commissioners and collusion by regulators in demanding ever increasing quantity of service without allocating the resources (mainly human) neeed, both quality and resilience will inevitably pay the price until retention of experienced GPs has become a major problem, recruitment will follow. You can only stretch existing resources so far before the fabric of care tears, attitudes of newly qualified GPs have shifted away from seeing their roles as a vocation and values are being lost. Primary care is not a way of keeping secondary care costs down, it is its own area with its own value and it underpins secondary care and emergency services. The deliberate undermining of primary care is only possible whilst a partnership model exists to absorb workload within imposed cost limits, when that model implodes a Trust eased service will overspend just as in secondary care, neighbourhood providers will be too big to fall and too big for alternative providers to step in and replace. Performers just won’t care about service sustainability, nor doing unpaid overtime because of their ethics – not their problem. Breaking the older generation of GPs will remove a layer that protects the population based on values that will disappear from primary care and the associated culture will not easily be reincarnated in a generation that know only a transactional relationship with employers. The whole world has versions of our secondary care, if they can pay – but few have an integrated primary care as we still do, it will be a tragic loss.
Stop blaming everyone else. We doctors have allowed the undermining of our profession. We will all suffer when we need care. We can change it if we all look up, regroup and rechampion the profession of medicine. We need to reclaim diagnosis as a doctors unique skill which others are not trained to do. They are not.
The GMC has lost all rights to comment due to a Prejudicial Conflict of Interest in the increase of non-doctor grades being allowed to Practice Medicine.
Empty gestures by the government and the GMC, which risks making the problem worse.
I love this. The GMC stand there looking bemused and failing to understand why GPs are being driven out of the profession while simultaneously working incredibly hard to drive GPSsout of the profession.
I’m currently looking for a different career, thanks to their behavior. If they would ever like to speak to me about why and how they have pushed me out, I would be delighted to assist.