Strategies to prioritise GP retention

As reported by GP online, Dr. Claire Fuller discusses her strategies to improve GP retention and address varying reasons for GPs leaving the profession across different regions in England.

Speaking at the Best Practice conference in Birmingham last week, she said her priorities in her new job would be GP retention, improving the primary and secondary care interface and patient safety in primary care.

She said the primary care access recovery plan, which NHS England published in May this year, would ‘reduce bureaucracy and hopefully improve working lives for GPs’.

However Dr Fuller also said that the reasons that GPs were leaving the profession ‘were different in different parts of the country.’

GP retention

‘It’s not the same all over the country,’ she said. ‘In some places salaried GPs are going up and locums are going down. So, we’re currently doing a bit of work to find out why people are leaving. And when we really understand by ICB why people are leaving, then we can have local conversations about what we need to do.

‘Because it is different in the Midlands than it is in Surrey and we need to make sure we don’t go for one-size-fits-all, because we’ll just get it wrong again.’

Speaking alongside Dr Fuller, NHS England director of primary care and community services Dr Amanda Doyle said NHS England recognised that it had ‘more to do about keeping fully-qualified GPs in the workplace’.

She said: ‘I think the only thing that’s going to do that is actually giving people hope that we can make the changes necessary to make the job doable, [so you] feel like you can deliver what you’re trying to do, that you can meet the demand – and that it’s the job you want to do for the next 30 years. So that’s the aim.’

She suggested that key to this could be a ‘creative career structure’, which included giving GPs the ability to ‘develop special interests within general practice, to train and educate, or take on leadership roles locally’.

GP workforce

‘All of that is really important, because that keeps people interested and keeps people wanting to stay in the workforce,’ Dr Doyle said.

The latest GP workforce data for general practice show that in August this year there were 27,246 fully-qualified, full-time equivalent (FTE) GPs in England. This is 2,118 fewer FTE GPs than in September 2015, when the government at the time first made a commitment to grow the workforce by 5,000.

Analysis by GPonline last month found that practices in England delivered 150,000 more appointments per working day in the six months to August 2023 compared with the same period in 2019. The BMA this week warned that pressure to work over and above their contracted hours was a key factor driving salaried GPs to take on locum roles or to leave the profession altogether.

Earlier this year RCGP chair Professor Kamila Hawthorne warned that the recent NHS worforce plan, developed by the government and NHS England, was ‘not nearly ambitious enough’ on measures to retain GPs. She said the plan offered ‘nothing that would stop a GP from wanting to leave’ beyond a sense of ‘hope on the horizon’.