GP practice empty and unwelcoming

littlerock

Visiting my GP practice recently I thought how empty and unwelcoming it had become. Just one full time practice GP partner (out of 3) and two salaried locums . Plus one receptionist. All the magazines and leaflets were removed ages ago, on health and safety grounds. You either have to come with something to read or use your phone.

At one time it had a small volunteer run coffee bar and lots of mothers and babies including a couple of walk in m and b sessions each week. Long gone. practice nurse only comes in two mornings a week to be seen by appointment. Yet they are advertising for new patients.

I wondered where the mother and baby groups had gone had gone, and looked them up on line. Locally they seem to have been turned into Health Visitor led sessions somewhere else and there is a big notice on the web link for these saying from the 1st June all local health visitor access for mothers and babies will be by appointment only.

K had to visit our local A and E recently and far from being full of elderly pensioners, it had a very high % of worried ethnic mothers with unhappy babies (we have a couple of large recent migrant communities locally .) I wonder if there is a connection with the loss of surgery walk in sessions? Plus it adds to pressure on A and E.

My GP practice moved into new custom built premises around 25 years ago and it is a large and now largely empty building. At the time we were told it was going to offer all sorts of services under one roof including drop in. Clearly NHS provision locally has gone in the opposite direction with services now all split up in different places and available only by appointment.

Is this typical or local to my area? I live in outer London..

Toothsmith

There are HUGE problems in GP recruitment at the moment.

It's a really unpopular branch of medicine for newly qualified medics to go into, and all those over 50 are counting down the days to their retirement. This isn't helped by changes in tax rates on pensions that mean that most of those that stay working after 55 would face huge tax bills on their pensions when they do take them.

littlerock

Well they are inviting applications from new patients prominently on their web site and this is a nice suburban area so it cannot all be down to a shortage of doctors., Not locally at any rate.

sheramber

The fact that they are using locums would indicate difficulty in getting permanent GP's.

littlerock

Actually I think it reflects that the two senior partners no longer work full time.

onwards&upwards

The country is short of about 2500 GPs and rising. It’s also short of about 40,000 nurses and rising.

This is a huge part of why services are not what they were or would ideally be.

Nicki

littlerock wrote: »

Actually I think it reflects that the two senior partners no longer work full time.

That makes no sense. If the two senior doctors made a permanent decision to work part time, then of course the practice needs a permanent GP to meet the shortfall in hours. The reason they rely on locums is, as sheramber has said, because of the shortage of GPs willing to take permanent roles.

Prior to the GP shortage locums were used to provide short term cover - eg to cover a maternity leave or other absence of a regular doctor.

greenbee

And the senior GPs could well be working part time because they can’t retire as they need to find new partners (not salaried partners or locums) to buy out the partnership.

Those doctors who do want to go into general practice usually want to be salaried rather than paying capital into the business and probably taking on liability for a massive mortgage as well.

Expect your practice to be taken over by a private supplier soon, when the partners can’t wait any longer to get their capital back.

Katiehound

Well our surgery is heaving! 2 practices have amalgamated so loads more patients and the waiting room halved in size as they built more treatment rooms.
However, you don't get to see a Dr! Several friendly nurse practioners who seem to deal with pretty much everything. Even then you need to phone at 8am.........and the town is growing...... NHS is certainly struggling. Sad

BucksLady

My husband is a GP and recently joined a new Practice as a Partner. There are three partners and two salaried docs. Two of the docs are off sick with stress (one of whom has been off 6 mths and has no return date) and one is on maternity leave. Finding locums to cover the posts has been extremely difficult. The system is broken. There just aren't enough GP's to care for us.


What I have noticed is that quite a number of GP's are considering private practice to avoid the stress which working within the NHS brings. A close friend of my husband has done just this. He charges £75 for 30 mins consultation (inclusive of a prescription charge) and there is no shortage of patients (from all walks of life). This service runs alongside the patient's own NHS provision - they still remain registered with their own GP. My husband would never consider doing the same, but I can see this practice becoming more popular. It is really a very sad situation.

fred246

Time to try to import some new GPs. I remember talking to an Indian GP about 10 years ago. I was saying "Maybe we could have a world with no border controls". She was laughing her head off. She said India was full of doctors who would love to work in the UK. I wonder if it is still the same.