Exclusive Around a quarter of salaried GPs and locums are looking for a permanent role at the same time as practices are facing a shortfall in GP numbers, a major new white paper by Pulse and its publishers Cogora has revealed.
The white paper is being launched in Parliament today, and lays bare the ongoing unemployment and recruitment crises in England, which is seeing GPs out of work at the same time as practices are facing a 16% shortfall in GP numbers.
The research involved surveys of 2,300 healthcare professionals working in general practice, interviews with more than 150 staff and analysis of 250 pieces of data for each GP practice in England. It found:
- 27% of the 399 salaried or locum GPs who responded to Pulse’s September survey said they were currently looking for work;
- The average time GP jobseekers have been searching is seven months, and they have reported finding an average of 2.47 appropriate roles in three months of looking;
- GP partners and practice managers, representing 640 practices in England, reported a 16% shortfall in the ideal number of GPs they would employ if recruitment wasn’t a problem – working out at around 5,300 across England;
- Almost half of 387 practice managers (45%) said the reason they haven’t been able to hire is due to funding, with 37% citing premises space;
- Practices in areas of higher deprivation and with larger non-white populations have fewer GPs per 1,000 patients than those in more affluent practices with a higher proportion of white patients.
Pulse first started reporting on unemployed GPs in around September 2023, with reports coming out that locum GPs were struggling to find work, and that people were traveling from Cumbria to Cornwall to take shifts.
A number of GPs spoke to Pulse and Cogora and to say they were struggling to find work. One locum in London said: ‘Our work has significantly reduced in the last 18 months in West London and all over the UK. Many colleagues are finding it very difficult to find work. Furthermore, we have accepted a reduced hourly rate in order to get some work. This is not sustainable. I have spoken with many colleagues who are planning to leave London, the NHS or retrain in something else. Some have already left and moved to Canada or Australia.’
One Bristol locum reported having to take shifts in the Shetland Islands. She said: ‘For 20 years, I had been earning most of my income as a locum GP in Bristol. In March 2024, I noticed fewer vacancies being advertised in Bristol. I saw an agency advertising for vacancies in NHS Highlands. I’d previously worked for a week in Shetland – because I wanted to at that point, not because I needed to. But when I saw the role come up this time around, I felt like I had no other option.’
As a result on this squeeze in locum shifts, many are now seeking permanent work. A GP in the North West said: ‘I was salaried, and then I left my role in October 2023 to get a better work-life balance.
Finding locum work wasn’t easy at the start, but I was able to get some roles, including in one practice for a couple of months. Then in September, October 2024 work started to dry up. I applied for salaried roles and was either getting no responses, or being told posts were closed because of too many applicants. I started panicking – thinking of getting work in Aldi over Christmas. I have a job now for two days a week. Ideally, I’d like to have stayed in a locum role, but I needed a bit more security.’
However, practices have reduced recruitment due to financial pressures and problems with premises. A survey by Pulse’s sister title, Management in Practice, found that only 24% of practice managers have not wanted to hire GPs, but the remaining 76% had been prevented by a combination of a lack of funding (45%) and a lack of space (37%).
Dr Ian Sweetenham, a GP partner in Cambridgeshire, says: ‘We couldn’t find GPs two years ago. Now that I have them coming out of my ears, I have no money to employ them.’
A GP partner in Leicestershire said: ‘As a practice we are always short of appointments, patient demand is tremendous. However, purely for financial reasons and the fact that the practice is struggling to function at a profit, when our three-session salaried GP resigned we made the decision not to replace them. Instead, we decided to try to manage as best as we could without these sessions. This was in spite of the fact that when we advertised to recruit a replacement for another departing GP in the last year, we had more than 20 applicants,
The problems with funding the recruitment of GPs have been exacerbated by the additional roles reimbursement scheme, and this is affecting care, GP partners said.
One GP partner in Buckinghamshire said their practice had to ‘restructure [to] keep our doors open and allow us to continue to provide a service including not replacing all the clinical sessions a retiring GP used to offer. More GP sessions are being replaced by cheaper clinicians’.
The white paper is being launched in conjunction with the Rebuild General Practice campaign, with the event in Parliament being launched by Dr Simon Opher, a GP who is the Labour Party MP for Stroud. He said: ‘As a GP, I understand the workforce resourcing desperately needed within the profession. As the Government, we must place a priority focus on general practice as the backbone of our NHS.
‘General practice is the first point of patient care and therefore we must ensure that this foundation is well equipped, resourced and funded to meet our patients’ needs. I am committed to continue working with our Government to ensure we can address the gaps within general practice to ensure the profession is fit for the future.’
You can find all the data and the methodology in the full report. Click here to download the full report
General practice is run by greedy pigs. Recking ball please.
Do you mean the GP partners or the managers in the NHS and politicians. If you mean the former then your comment should probably be reported. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. If you do mean the partners though (I’m not one and have no intention to become a partner) then you’re picking a fight in the wrong forum.
By the way, it’s “wrecking” ball.
NHS England Digital states that from GPs tax returns after expenses 2022/23 (latest figures): £140,200 for full time contractor GPs & £69,200 for full time salaried GPs. Could the practices where the 50% of GP partners earning over £140,000 not take on these GPs who can’t find work and enjoy a better work-life balance themselves. I can understand why the other 50% of GP partners earning less than £140,000 would be reluctant to reduce their incomes taking on extra partners in their practices, but the 50% high earners – surely there is more to life than high earnings?
Nigel, is salaried did the same job as partners – sure they would. The reality is that is not the case. Please do compare apples with apples rather than apples with oranges or any other fruit of your choosing.
Nigel, if salaried did the same job as partners – sure they would. The reality is that is not the case. Please do compare apples with apples rather than apples with oranges or any other fruit of your choosing.
This topic always descends into a punch-up between Partners and Salaried/Locum.
Folks, we’re rats fighting each other in a sack being tossed into the canal by an uncaring government.
The greedy lazy Partners versus greedy lazy Locums spat is playing right into their hands. Divide and Conquer, they know the drill.
So instead of pitting the Judean Peoples’ Front against the Peoples’ Front of Judea, let’s focus on fighting the Romans.
What a wonderful suggestion Nigel D.
When I was a partner we earnt £100k and our salaried GP was paid £70k. That gap has widened, as you point out, so that GP principals now extract double salaried GP pay. And then there are those “rotten apples” extracting above average profits of £140k to £200k. I know a local GP principal, senior partner and PCN CD who only does 2 patient clinics, and whose younger partners moan that he takes £250k!! Are these high earning GP principals good economic value – no they’re not.
Since becoming a p/t locum last 10 yrs I’ve earnt around £65k – £70k pa for 6-7 wkly sessions and chosen a lovely work life balance. But the point I’d make is that for every penny and pound I earnt, I worked seeing patients for every minute. And this is true of all other salaried and locum GPs that I know of (even the so-called greedy lazy ones see patients for every penny they get paid).
But this is obviously not true of all GP principals – some avoid patient care, and spend sessions sitting on boards, having coffee “meetings” with their PMs, going to the golf club etc…
So the reality is our GP profession has been divided for many years now (nb, the BMA furthers this division by not even bothering to ballot salaried and locum GPs re striking for a better funded GP service). I think the situation we find ourselves in, ie the running down of general practice, is primarily the fault of successive Govts and also those Quisling GPs, PCN CDs etc who are too cosy with the NHS management, but I would say also the fault of a sufficiently significant number of GP principals who put making excess profits over patient care. By the way, one way they increase profits is to cut salaried and locum GP costs, then telling their reception staff to send patients to A+E or 111. These Faustian types should have sought careers in the private sector…
This Govt, puppet master TBI, will use this division to further destroy traditional general practice.
By the way, expect that in the ongoing contract negotiations, the BMA and the usual GP contractor culprits will sell out to the TBI BLairabour Govt who will allow the independent contractor status to remain for another 10 years, but at the cost of the wholesale entry of unregulated Big Tech into the NHS as well as further corporate privatisation.
Say goodbye to traditional continuity of care general practice (at its peak in the 1990s for me) and hello to care by algorithm and artificial “intelligence” systems..