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We did say this would happen

Just one in four GPs are now working full-time, a drop from one third in five years, official figures show.

It follows research showing most GPs now work three days or less a week.

The feminisation of GPs was always going to lead to this. Maternity leaves, part time working when children young etc.

Of course, glorious, economic liberation of women and all that.

Except for 2 things.

1) That £250k cost of training a GP is now spread over many fewer lifetime working hours. Therefore GP services have become more expensive.

2) Govt plans the number of GPs. Govt planning should have grasped this problem and increased the number trained. It didn’t. Isn’t that an interesting insight into the ability of government planning?

17 thoughts on “We did say this would happen”

  1. 3) Wimmins will scthream and scthream that by working fewer lifetime hours they will earn less than men working more lifetime hours.

  2. Bloke in North Dorset

    I can’t find the link now, but I’m fairly sure the BMJ voted against the training of more doctors around 2015 and government is stupid enough to listen to the likes of the BMJ.

  3. I don’t really understand why £250K of training is required. You go and see your GP and they can diagnose about a dozen things like throat infections, skin problems, colds, high blood pressure. Anything else they’re guessing or refer you. And all they do with those things is to throw a few drugs at you, and if that doesn’t work they shrug or refer you.

    I reckon you could sit with a GP and work out the dozen routine things they do, put it in a flowchart and train people in a month to do the same job. I’ve never been to a GP and had any value added by them. Either they tell me what I already know, or they refer me. The only reason I go with a throat infection is that Boots can’t give me amoxicillin. I’m pretty sure that you could train the pharmacists to spot a likely throat infection in a weekend, though.

    There are people who get jailed because they faked their qualifications, but they managed to work for years or decades as doctors. So clearly, the qualification isn’t actually necessary, or they’d have been picked up on, right?

  4. Hunt did actually raise the medical school cap to increase doctor training by 25%. Of course, the more obvious step of deregulating both numbers, pay and medical school fees stayed exactly the same 🙁

  5. The other big thing is the lifetime tax allowance. After 2 or 3 decades of big earnings, it’s no longer possible to pay tax-efficiently into a pension, and it pretty soon becomes not worth working full-time.

  6. We actually have a private sector comparator. Vets. They run themnselves, AFAIK. Everything is done by market forces. And you can always get an appointment for Rover or if it’s Dobbin, the vet will come out.

    (I have no idea whether the pension problem is causing the same problems with them.)

    And they don’t seem to have administrators or diversity officers.

  7. “What’s a GP? I’ve heard of them, but don’t think I’ve seen one for a while…”

    If the GPs don’t want to do face to face, why don’t we just use more of them from Bangalore and Nigeria like we do with software? Is anyone doing this privately? And can they get a prescription to Boots this way, so I don’t have to fight for an appointment like people in Soylent Green getting food?

  8. why don’t we just use more of them from Bangalore and Nigeria

    As far back as the 1990s, my mother’s local surgery in Derbyshire was entirely staffed by S Asian doctors.

  9. Dentists and Doctors… Given many of our female GPs only turn up at the office 2-3 days/week, their on the job experience is less than half that you would expect of a young male GP. If you also include the time girls also take off to produce and rear brats they will have forgotten 80pct of what they learned at medical school. That said, my 55-y-o white male GP is a retard of the first order and total waste of space so we’re not missing out on anything.

  10. @ BoM4

    Expert systems they used to be called where you coded a set of symptoms and the possible causes.

    What idiot journo’s now would call AI.

  11. AC,

    “Expert systems they used to be called where you coded a set of symptoms and the possible causes.”

    I don’t even think you need that to replace most GPs. A pamphlet the size of a football programme with some flowcharts would do most of the job. Voice sounds like shit, hard to swallow? Your GP will diagnose it as a throat infection, just like your mum or wife will. They’ll send you off with a script for amoxicillin. If you come back a week later because it hasn’t cleared up they’ll give you another antibiotic. Still not fixed? They’ll refer you.

    It’s not a huge amount of added value, is it? The value adds in medicine are diagnosis and surgery. If the diagnosis is what you can do anyway, the value is zero. And they don’t do any surgery, so also zero. Why do I go to my GP? Because they’re the gatekeepers for antibiotics and referrals. If I could find someone online who would just send me antibiotics from some rogue state I could ditch most of my time wasting with them.

    And just to add: there are lots of great doctors working in specialist departments. People in Eye Hospitals and Podiatry and ENT who know all sorts of crazy stuff that you don’t. We should have more medical students doing this.

  12. I’m a Doctor.

    GP’s are entitled, overpaid and workshy.

    Modern general practice is betamax technology in a download age.

  13. @BiND

    GMC and GDC dictate to Gov’t how many UK ‘aspiring’ doctors and dentists can be educated each year. Other than doc & dent shortages it means many UK Unis are educating majority foreign

    If you have a gander at the GDC’s disciplinary tribunal list you might not be so keen on importing loads of foreign dentists

    Mrs Pcar is a dentist

  14. The specialist nurses that I see regularly as a diabetic are very knowledgeable. I’ve been off medication for a while now and my memory may be faulty but I believe that, if they want to put you back on the meds for a while they have to go to one of the doctors to get it approved.

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