GPS on four-day week as long hours rejected

The average GP now works a four-day week, adding to shortages of doctors, health officials have said. Prof Ian Cumming, head of Health Education England, said the millennial generation did not want to work the hours done by baby boomers. As a result, numbers of full-time equivalent GPS had fallen.

THE average GP now works a four-day week, adding to shortages of doctors, health officials have said.

Prof Ian Cumming, the head of Health Education England, said the millennial generation did not want to work the hours done by baby boomers.

The average worked by doctors used to be around four and a half days a week, he said. As a result, the number of full-time-equivalent doctors in the system has fallen.

Prof Cumming said: “Our workforce are choosing to work fewer hours. Part of this is because of generation Y and Z and millennials starting to come through, who are increasingly not wanting to work the same number of hours that many of the baby boomers and generation X want to work.”

The average GP worked 90 per cent of full-time hours in 2009, NHS data shows – equivalent to four and a half days. Now the figure is 83 per cent, Prof Cumming said – which is closer to a four-day week. The chief executive said that overall, the NHS had seen a 10 per cent reduction in clinical hours worked by GPS in recent years.

Prof Cumming told delegates at the NHS Confederation’s conference in Liverpool: “Another way of putting that is you’re dealing with 10 per cent more patients, you’re under 10 per cent more pressure.”

The trend is likely to continue, he added. A study by the King’s Fund published last year found only one in 10 trainee GPS plan to work full-time.

Patients’ groups said the trend was “extraordinary” and that family doctors were lucky to be able to afford to work part-time, with average earnings of £100,000 for a GP partner. Two thirds of GPS under 40 are female, with part-time working popular among those raising families.

Last month new figures prompted warnings that waiting times to see a GP are on course to rise sharply amid a six-fold rise in vacancies for family doctors.