Number of GPs working in England FALLS by more than 300 in a year despite Government promises to hire more
- Government promised 5,000 extra doctors by next year but numbers are down
- There were 28,315 fully qualified GPs working in England in September this year
- This is a drop of 339 since last September and 382 less than in March this year
- Doctors unions’ said GPs are risking their own health to cope with workloads
The NHS has hemorrhaged hundreds of GPs again this year despite Government pledges to hire thousands more, figures show.
Official data up to September revealed 339 family doctors quit the heath service in the last 12 months.
And almost as many GPs left the NHS between June 2018 and June 2019 as did in the entire three years to March.
Doctors’ union the British Medical Association (BMA) said falling GP numbers mean strained GPs are risking their own health to catch up with huge workloads.
The losses again highlight the spectacular failure of the Government’s pledge to hire 5,000 extra GPs by 2020.
The NHS has hemorrhaged 339 doctors this year amid a staffing crisis. Doctors’ unions said falling numbers mean strained doctors are risking their own health (stock)
BMA council chair Dr Chaand Nagpaul said: ‘Despite promises to fix the workforce crisis in the NHS, there are still almost 10,0001 medical vacancies.
‘These figures confirm this is a far cry from the full complement of staff that is so desperately required to deliver the care patients need.
‘Significant holes in the workforce across areas such as acute medicine and mental health care, particularly in some parts of the country, means that staff are being pushed, often at a detriment to their own health, to make up these shortfalls.
GPs in the UK have been suffering with growing workloads and concerns about the workforce shrinking for years.
A poll in February found 42 per cent of NHS GPs said they intended to leave or retire within five years, up from less than a third (32 per cent) in 2014.
The research by the University of Warwick found almost a fifth (18 per cent) said they would leave within two years.
Terminally ill patients are missing out on ideal care, according to other research by the Royal College of GPs in February, with doctors saying they are too busy to look after dying people.
Although 92 per cent of doctors said end-of-life care is an ‘important’ part of being a doctor, four out of five of them say they don’t have enough time to do it well.
And long appointment waits are still a problem for patients across England.
Between January and March this year, 12.3million appointments were completed 15 days or more after patients had booked to see their doctor.
This was a 14 per cent rise from the 10.8million during the same period last year, and represents one in six patients overall.
Experts said the figures show how GPs’ workloads are expanding as the number of appointments continues to grow but the number of doctors falls.
‘This is not fair for staff and not fair for patients. The UK falls well below comparable high-income countries in terms of the number of doctors per population – we do not have to accept this as the norm.
‘The Government must do all it can to both retain doctors, including addressing the pension crisis, and ramp up its recruitment efforts by investing in the NHS to make it an attractive career option for doctors and staff from the UK, the EU and internationally.’
Official figures released today showed there were 28,315 full-time equivalent, fully qualified doctors doctors practicing in England in September.
This was a drop of 339 since last September and 382 less than in March this year after a small bump in recruitment.
Overall, numbers are rising as locum doctors and trainees who are not yet fully qualified bring the total number of full-time GPs up to 34,862.
This was 0.9 per cent more than a year earlier but suggests staff are cutting their hours or being replaced by junior doctors who can’t yet work without supervision.
As well as overstretched patient lists, doctor numbers have been hit by a row over pension rules which mean NHS employees face heavy and ‘unfair’ taxes once they’ve saved up a certain amount of money.
This has led to some cutting their hours to keep their pension contributions down and may even have triggered early retirements, unions have said.
The NHS has been in the grip of a recruitment crisis for years and is now thought to be short of around 100,000 staff, among them doctors and nurses.
Jeremy Hunt, the former Health Secretary, pledged in 2015 that the Government would head a recruitment drive to hire 5,000 more GPs by 2020.
His promise has failed and there are now about 1,000 fewer fully-qualified full-time equivalent staff and 150 fewer in total.
But his successor, Matt Hancock, said earlier this year he was still committed to the target and would soon set a new timeline to achieve it.
HOW HAS THE GP CRISIS CHANGED THIS YEAR?
GPs in the UK have been suffering with growing workloads and concerns about the workforce shrinking for years.
A poll in February found 42 per cent of NHS GPs said they intended to leave or retire within five years, up from less than a third (32 per cent) in 2014.
The research by the University of Warwick found almost a fifth (18 per cent) said they would leave within two years.
Terminally ill patients are missing out on ideal care, according to other research by the Royal College of GPs in February, with doctors saying they are too busy to look after dying people.
Although 92 per cent of doctors said end-of-life care is an ‘important’ part of being a doctor, four out of five of them say they don’t have enough time to do it well.
And long appointment waits are still a problem for patients across England.
Between January and March this year, 12.3million appointments were completed 15 days or more after patients had booked to see their doctor.
This was a 14 per cent rise from the 10.8million during the same period last year, and represents one in six patients overall.
Experts said the figures show how GPs’ workloads are expanding as the number of appointments continues to grow but the number of doctors falls.
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