The government still refuses to use the word ‘crisis’,1 but I suppose that is not surprising a short time before an election. I am saddened that the College seems to be in some ways acting as a mouthpiece for the Department of Health, by trying to encourage students and postgraduates into a career in general practice; a speciality that currently is broken. Fortunately, our younger colleagues can use social media and get a true picture.
My wife and I both took early retirement from general practice, in our late 50s. The strain of trying to be ‘all things to all people’ was just getting too much. We were worried that we would start to make mistakes by just having too many balls to juggle.
A number of things have occurred to me: did no one think that scrapping seniority payments would be a disincentive for older GPs to stay on, and that introducing a contract with an open-ended workload for no extra money was unacceptable? The complaints culture takes up too much time and effort for doctors: the GMC is an organisation out of control, which we now find, according to its own report, has been involved in the deaths of at least 28 doctors under investigation. The Retainer Scheme needs a complete overhaul; our practice refused to have retainers as the rules meant we might have to pay redundancy to a retained doctor for all their previous NHS service! GPs have had years of pay cuts now. The CQC is an added burden, and as we see from the recent fiasco over the release of misleading statistics to the public, is not fit for purpose.
Many GPs are using their own strategy now to keep their sanity; ‘RLE’: Retire, Locum, Emigrate. A senior colleague recently said to me that the government has taken general practice back to the 1960s. What is proposed is too little, too late, but may just possibly make the public think something is being done until the election in May.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2015
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