Top GPs earning over £300,000 - The Times

drc

From The (Sunday) Times;

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article7060978.ece

Top GPs earning over £300,000
Doctors’ pay has rocketed despite anger at a poor out-of-hours service



Suppiah Ratneswaren says he works very hard and is not a 'money-hungry' doctor

BRITAIN’S highest-paid GPs have broken through the £300,000-a-year barrier working for the National Health Service.
One of them, Suppiah Ratneswaren, 61, who is linked to four separate NHS practices in the south London borough of Greenwich, has admitted he is earning between £300,000 and £400,000 a year, 90% of it from the health service.
The respected GP spoke out after The Sunday Times obtained figures which revealed that one GP operating in the Greenwich area had earned £378,000 in a year solely by working for the NHS. Another earned £270,000 and six others have pocketed more than £190,000 in annual earnings.
The figures, disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, relate to 2007 and 2008, the most recent year for which data are available.

Ratneswaren insisted yesterday that he was not the highest-paid doctor in Greenwich: “I don’t want to be seen as a money-hungry doctor because I am driven by the quality of work and I work very hard. I have got nothing to hide.”
Pressed about his yearly earnings, Ratneswaren said: “It’s closer to £300,000 than £400,000.” He said 90% of his earnings were from the NHS, while the rest was generated through private services such as treating the relatives of patients who might be in Britain on holiday.
He said his practices received about £90 per year for each patient signed to it and insisted that doctors should not feel guilty about their earnings.
He also earns performance-related pay that rewards him for meeting a series of administrative and clinical targets such as measuring cholesterol levels among patients at risk. He said the country was benefiting from performance-related pay, “because I will argue that we have improved the quality of services to the patients”.
He defended doctors’ right to high earnings: “Medical professionals always put themselves in a different context to lawyers and other professionals such as City boys, and that’s why I suppose there’s a difference in the pay and the way they are perceived in the community.”
A second GP in the trust area, Hany Wahba, 56, has also been named by colleagues as one of the country’s highest-paid doctors. Wahba, who heads a practice in Plumstead, one of London’s poorest areas, and sits on the local committee of the British Medical Association (BMA), said: “I am not in a position to discuss anything. I don’t want to be dragged into something I don’t want to say.”
The disclosure that GPs in one trust are earning so much will raise concerns about NHS contracts introduced in 2004. These allowed GPs to opt out of night and weekend work while fuelling a surge in their earnings. About half of a practice’s current income is now a flat rate based on the number and needs of their patients, calculated on factors such as age, gender, levels of morbidity and mortality rates.
The average GP’s salary has risen from £70,000 to £104,000 in six years and 300 senior GPs in England and Wales now earn more than £250,000 a year.
Critics say the contracts work to the advantage of practices with large populations in urban areas such as south London. Ratneswaren has 13,000 patients across his four practices with 9,000 at one in Greenwich — almost 50% higher than the average for England.
At the same time the change has left many areas short of night-time cover. A report by the Patients Association, published yesterday, found that one in six patients in some trusts regarded out-of-hours provision in their area as poor or very poor.
Richard Vautrey, deputy chairman of the BMA’s GP committee, has defended the payments system: “This was a deliberate attempt by the government to ensure GPs’ pay was increased because it had lagged behind other professionals.”
NHS Greenwich said practices were private contractors that could pay their staff as they chose, adding that the highest-earning GP undertook a variety of work for the NHS.

worldtraveller

No surprise here!

My post from 2006:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=3706580&postcount=18

Brown talked only last week about a pay freeze for GPs, but many are so well paid already that a failure to stop increasing their salaries any further will have very little impact, which is further evidence of the spectacularly costly taxpayer paid for blunder that the Government made when it renegotiated contracts with them.

Graham_Devon

To be earning what he is earning, and how he is earning it, i.e. across 4 GP practices, it sounds like he has bought in to other surgeries, on a business level.

He can't possibly work at all 4 at the same time, so wouldn't be able to make this sort of money unless he was a silent partner of some sort, or owns the other practices and has others working there, or is working every single night for the local on call service aswell as a full week!

peterg1965

Disgraceful.

abaxas

If you have any questions over doctors pay.. Ask me, I used to work on the system that pays them.

phil_b_2

I am yet to meet a GP who is worth more that £20k a year, yet alone 300k. Most I have seen have been of no use, other than to refer me to a 'specialist', who also wast a great deal of use.

Graham_Devon

phil_b wrote: »

I am yet to meet a GP who is worth more that £20k a year, yet alone 300k. Most I have seen have been of no use, other than to refer me to a 'specialist', who also wast a great deal of use.

Either you are a hypocondriac, therefore you will always think the doc is wrong.

Or, you assume that medicine is an exact science.

Or both.

Cleaver

phil_b wrote: »

I am yet to meet a GP who is worth more that £20k a year, yet alone 300k. Most I have seen have been of no use, other than to refer me to a 'specialist', who also wast a great deal of use.

Didn't mean to thank this generalisation.

In what way have they been 'no use'?

abaxas

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Either you are a hypocondriac, therefore you will always think the doc is wrong.

Or, you assume that medicine is an exact science.

Or both.

The problem is that people dont understand how little GPs do. Most of their work could be better done with more specialist nurses.

boomerangs

drc wrote: »

Suppiah Ratneswaren says he works very hard

This is the bit that gets me. It's the rather familiar excuse given by people who earn obscene amounts of money. Remember the bankers?

People who sweep the streets, etc. work hard too . Indeed most of the people I know work hard but they don't get paid £300,000 per year out of my taxes. It also worth remembering that the only reason they're getting £300K per year is because the Labour party decided to treble their wages. So then did they not work hard before their wages were trebled?

Cleaver

boomerangs wrote: »

People who sweep the streets, etc. work hard too but they don't get paid £300,000 per year. It also worth remembering that the only reason they're getting £300K per year is because the Labour party decided to treble their wages. Did they not work hard before their wages were trebled?

Working hard is a quality required in all jobs. However, you don't need year and years of intense training and qualifications to be a street cleaner. You also don't have the responsibility of life and death on a daily basis. And you don't need to work at a high level with social, acute and primary care provides accross your community to make strategic plans to ensure that your local population is healthy and treated appropriately. You just need to sweep the streets. That's why one probably pays about £20k and the other £100k.

Also, they haven't had their wages trebled under Labour, although they are probably paid too much for not enough work. The average GP will earn about £100k. Like all professions there will be the odd few who somehow earn a load more, as this article points out, but that's the exception not the rule.

I want my GP to be qualified up to their eyeballs and have a fantastic knowledge of a wide area of medical subjects. With all the other work they do I would say that £100k is about right for the skills, experience, effort and pressures that come with the job. The mistake the Department of Health made was not getting enough control of GPs in the new contract and with it the ability to make them work a lot more flexibily for their patients.

I just love the simplistic bashing that professions get on this forum.