Union fury at ‘scandalous’ £10k windfall for doctors

New contract package offers no-strings cash but rural practices will miss out

NEW GP contracts will hand partners an average windfall of £10,000 per year – prompting warnings that doctors will pocket the cash as a personal salary hike.

The cash boost was branded “scandalous” by the trade union representing paramedics at a time when NHS staff earning less than £30,000 a year have been promised only a three per cent rise once the long-running public sector pay cap is lifted.

John Marr, GMB branch secretary for the Scottish Ambulance Service, said: “We have been calling for an increase in resources across Scotland and this just makes a mockery of it. How much would it cost the Government to put more ambulances on the road, to put more nurses in A&E to bring the waiting times down? But they’re giving this to GPs as a backhander – here’s a pay rise for doing what you do. I just think that’s scandalous.”

Matt McLaughlin, Unison’s regional organiser for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, said: “Hardpressed NHS workers such as cleaners, porters and nurses will be surprised that the Scottish Government appears to be rewarding a significant pay increase to general practitioners without the same strings that are attached to their measly pay offers.”

An estimated 68 per cent of GP partners in Scotland will share in a £23.2 million windfall paid for by the taxpayer under a controversial new funding allocation formula based on workload.

The uplift, which equates to an average 10.2 per cent hike per partner – or £10,290 based on an average fulltime partner salary of £100,000 – will be delivered no strings attached if the proposed new Scottish GP contract is approved next week.

Due to their status as independent contractors, GPs can choose how to spend the cash and could invest it in patient services or hiring extra practice staff.

However, Dr Erik Jespersen MBE, a senior partner at Lorn Medical Centre in Oban and former medical director for Argyll and Bute who provided the figures to The Herald, said that most would not.

He said: “It is very likely that a majority of GP partners will take the additional income as profit, and in many cases it will not directly benefit patient care.”

The BMA dispute Dr Jespersen’s calculations, insisting that it is impossible pull out a precise percentage of full-time partners who will benefit because the £23m will be shared between 63 per cent of practices which vary in size and by the number of sessions worked by individual GPs.

But Dr Jespersen said it was the most accurate estimate possible based on the most recent workforce data for Scotland. His view has been corroborated by other healthcare statisticians.

He stressed that the sum was “not unfair” in itself after years of squeezed salaries and a widening gulf in earnings between GPs and consultants, but said the problem was “the way it’s distributed according to the flawed workload formula”. Workload is counted according to the number of available appointments – itself an indicator of the number of doctors in practice – not practice list size. While 63 per cent of practices will gain, the rest – in rural Scotland and some of Scotland’s poorest communities – will get nothing.

Professor Philip Wilson, professor of primary care and rural health at Aberdeen University, said: “The differ- ential between Shetland and a comfortable suburb of Glasgow has now increased. It’s going to make it easier for practices in Glasgow to recruit doctors and easier for them to pay locums, but practices in Caithness for example – which are already having to pay £1,000 a day to attract locums – are not going to be able to carry on.”

Similarly, of the 10 most deprived practices in Scotland, five will gain

nothing under the formula while the other five will receive an average uplift in their total financial allocation of 1.9 per cent.

Professor Graham Watt, founder of Scotland’s Deep End project for practices in the poorest areas, said: “Despite what the First Minister and Cabinet Secretary said in the Scottish Parliament in December 2015 the new contract funding does not address the unmet needs of patients in deprived areas.”

Dr Alan McDevitt, chairman of BMA Scotland’s GP Committee, said: “The proposed contract will ensure every practice in Scotland has their finances protected, while providing more financial support to those pr actices with under-resourced higher workloads.”

A Scottish Government spokesman said: “Our ambition is to increase the number of GPs by at least 800 over 10 years to ensure a sustainable service.”