Don’t blame women GPs for the shortage of doctors

THERE’S no doubt the NHS is in pretty dire straits, yet if anyone needed confirmation, it was reported this week that in the past 12 months, a third of paediatric wards had to close for a period because of a lack of doctors and almost half of all GP surgeries are having to close during working hours — again, due to a lack of doctors.

The Public Accounts Committee warned that there was ‘no credible plan’ in place to address the shortfall.

This is bigger than just funding — there just aren’t enough doctors in this country to fill the jobs. The problem is that no politician thinks in terms of decades, and yet longterm thinking was what was required to head off this disaster, because it takes more than ten years to train a doctor.

And as demand for doctors has increased, the shortfall has grown. This is partly because in the past we’ve relied heavily on doctors from countries such as India, and new immigration rules in 2010 meant the number coming from outside the EU has plummeted.

The other issue is the makeup of the workforce is changing fast. People shy away from talking about this through fear of being branded sexist, but it’s a fact that more and more women are becoming doctors and this has had a profound impact on the number of doctors working. A 15year followup of doctors after graduation showed that, on average, women work 25 per cent less than their male counterparts. The problem is that the average male medical graduate will work fulltime, while the average female won’t.

This is already starting to affect hospitals and primary care: 38 per cent of female consultants work parttime, compared with 5 per cent of male consultants. Two thirds of women are GPS, with a large proportion opting for less than fulltime.

As medicine becomes a femalemajority profession, the issue will only get worse.

Underlying this is, of course, a larger debate about why women remain torn between a career and a family, while men tend not to be.

This is where the sexism lies. But until there’s a shift in the way domestic responsibilities are distributed between men and women, we need to accept that women want to work parttime and, in medicine at least, to start preparing for it becoming the norm. That means significantly increasing the number of places at medical school. Otherwise we’re simply going to run out of doctors.