Bytheway...TheREALreasonfortheGPshortage

Too few newly-trained doctors want to be GPs and that’s causing something of a panic.

The Government has pledged there will be 5,000 more GPs by the end of this Parliament and yet currently we’re not even providing enough to replace those who are about to retire, so great are the numbers leaving the service early on account of disillusionment.

Goodwill has been the oil on the wheels of general practice from time immemorial, but it appears that this invisible yet precious asset is now running out.

The fact is the joy and reward of GP work is being destroyed by frustration over endless changes, ever-increasing red tape — thanks to the cumbersome and incompetent Care Quality Commission — and other endless pressures.

All this detracts from what the job is about: taking care of sick patients. When I entered medical school, we were told that 50 per cent of us would eventually choose to become GPs, rather than consultants, as we imagined. Few of us really believed such propaganda, but as we approached graduation five years on, wiser and more experienced, more and more of us decided to train for family medicine.

Back then there were 50 or 60 competitors for every job, so great was the popularity of posts — despite the prospect of house calls, nights and weekends on duty, and that sense of being bottom of the pile again as the third or fourth partner in a group of senior GPs.

Why is it that now that fewer and fewer graduates are training for general practice?

It’s been suggested the problem is too few hours are given to GP training during university years.

In fact, in my day we had only a two to fourweek attachment to a general practice and yet when the time came, we still fought tooth and nail for a job. We also had only one two-hour session of training in medical ethics.

My point is that it’s the culture in doctor training that influences medical students’ attitudes to becoming a GP, or to what constitutes professional and ethical behaviour.

More GP training for undergraduates is likely to put off young doctors from choosing it as their career. It’s not lack of exposure during undergraduate training, it’s the widely known destruction of the satisfaction of being a family doctor that’s the problem.

If those at the top don’t get the message, the way ahead is threatened by further erosion of a treasure of the NHS — primary care.

And the solution will only be more care via call centres with half-trained staff reading from lists of questions with the occasional supplementation of doctors, of some sort, drafted in from other cultures. Is that what we want?