GPs ‘working for free’ to stay on performers list, says BMA

Exclusive GPs are working for free in order to stay on the performers list as a result of the unemployment crisis, according to the BMA.

In an exclusive interview with Pulse, the BMA’s GP registrars committee co-chairs said this is a ‘real issue’ since GPs may ‘lose the whole ability to practise’.

Dr Victoria McKay and Dr Cheska Ball also said the lack of work available in general practice is driving new GPs to look at jobs in areas like sexual health or in the RAF, or at practice jobs with ‘incredibly low pay’, or to look at their eligibility for employment benefits.

They called for the Government to to provide urgent ‘ring-fenced’ funding for practices to employ GPs this year.

Yesterday, on the first day of the UK LMCs conference in Glasgow, BMA sessional GP chair Dr Mark Steggles revealed ‘heartbreaking’ stories of doctors struggling to find work, with some planning to move abroad without their families in order to send money back or exploring different careers as life coaches or bus drivers.

Dr McKay called for ring-fenced funding that should be implemented ‘via a similar mechanism to the kind of winter pressures funding that hospitals will get when they get a surge in flu or Covid’.

‘That’s what we’re asking for, to hire GPs to try and prevent a whole cohort of our colleagues getting to August and literally having no jobs in general practice to go to,’ Dr McKay said.

She also said this funding would be open to all GPs, rather than those who are newly qualified – as is the case for the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS).

Dr McKay continued: ‘Ideally this would all be part of an uplift to core, and the number of registrars qualifying would be matched by the same number of GP posts.’

But she said that if we lose GPs to other countries offering ‘attractive deals’, the UK is ‘never going to get them back’.

She added: ‘This is why the urgency of this [ringfenced funding] exists, because a core funding uplift is going to take time. We’re going to lose a whole generation of GPs that we’ve trained if we don’t do something about it now.’

On the employment crisis facing qualified GPs right now, Dr Ball said: ‘There are individuals picking up sessions, so work for half a day, a full day, for free, because they need to stay on the performers list, which is a real issue, actually.’

The co-chairs told Pulse they had heard reports of this issue from colleagues.

Regulations around the medical performers list states that GPs must do a minimum of one session per year, but there is an expectation that GPs do around 40 sessions per year to maintain their fitness-to-practise.

Dr Ball also told of her own experience after qualifying this year: ‘I’ve been trying to get a job, and I’ve applied to loads of different things – not clinical, looking into going back into studying again. But also things like RAF.

‘My offer that I got initially was for sexual health, not GP at all. And then the offers that I have had from general practice, initially, I did get one which was incredibly low pay my local area.’

Dr McKay also said that the BMA recently ran a ‘job success’ workshop for GPs which was ‘fully booked within eight hours’ with the ‘waiting list growing every day’.

‘We are seeing that the problem is literally growing,’ she added.

In her speech to the LMCs conference this morning, Dr McKay told GP leaders: ‘We have members of our own GP registrars committee, who have recently obtained their CCT, contemplating taking jobs as the duty doctor in acute sexual health, taking salaried jobs two hours travel each way from their homes, and some who even considered whether they would need unemployment benefits.’

This year, Pulse’s publisher Cogora launched a white paper in Parliament on the paradox of the recruitment and unemployment paradox within general practice.