£20k ‘bribe’ for doctors to ease GP staffing crisis
JEREMY Hunt will today offer trainee GPs a £20,000 ‘golden hello’ in a desperate bid to get them to work in understaffed practices.
The Health Secretary is to announce a one-off payment for junior doctors who move to rural and coastal areas.
The bonuses – on top of starting salaries of up to £45,000 – are part of an attempt to stem the growing GP crisis.
Mr Hunt will tell the Royal College of GPs conference in Liverpool that the workforce ‘is under considerable pressure’.
The £20,000 payments alone – given to those who do their three-year training in ‘priority areas’ – are almost as much as a nurse’s £22,000 starting salary.
GPs who become practice partners can expect to earn an average of £106,000 a year. But amid growing workloads, two in five experienced family doctors say they plan to leave the NHS within five years.
And morale among junior doctors is at an all-time low after last year’s bruising strikes, with many trainees opting to take time out or work abroad as a result of the dispute over contracts.
The staffing crisis is helping drive up waiting times by 15 per cent a year.
The wait for non- emergency appointments, currently at 13 days, is projected to hit three weeks by 2022.
Mr Hunt will also announce flexible hours in a bid to stop GPs retiring, and plans to expand the role of controversial physician associates – dubbed ‘doctors on the cheap’ as they do not have medical degrees.
He will pledge to fast-track applications of doctors from outside Europe – particularly Australia – in an attempt to recruit 2,000 foreign GPs.
There are also plans for a Government clinical negligence indemnity for GPs so that they do not have to pay spiralling fees to private insurance firms.
The ‘golden hellos’, which will be introduced in August, are projected to be used to appoint 200 trainees in the first year.
Areas that have not filled their training places for the last three years will be eligible, likely to include parts of Cumbria, Norfolk, Cornwall and Somerset, as well as Hull, Swindon and Grimsby.
In the worst-hit parts of the country, hundreds of surgeries have closed or merged because they do not have enough staff.
Joyce Robins, of Patient Con- cern, said: ‘It’s a real problem – some of these areas are really unpopular among doctors and the patients suffer as a result.
‘If it’s out in the country, if it’s boring, if their friends aren’t there, young doctors do not want to work there.
‘It’s depressing but this seems to be the only thing the Government can do. If they can’t get people to go to these areas what else can they do but offer them money?’
Highlighting a commitment to spend an additional £2.4billion on primary care by 2021, the Health Secretary is to tell the conference today that the changes will ‘strengthen and secure general practice for the future’.
The scheme, which has been piloted in areas including Leicester and Doncaster, was welcomed by Royal College of GPs chairman Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard.
She said: ‘We have an incredibly serious shortage of GPs right across the country, but there are some areas that struggle to recruit more than others and often they are in remote and rural areas.’
But Dr Richard Vautrey, of the British Medical Association’s GP committee, said it was unlikely to solve the crisis as there were not enough GPs being trained. He said a BMA survey found one in three practices had vacancies they could not fill within a year.
Two years ago, the Government pledged to hire 5,000 new GPs by 2020 – but numbers have actually fallen since the plan was announced, down to 34,200 fulltime equivalent doctors.
The shortfall is projected to get worse, with the Royal College of GPs warning the profession ‘could reach breaking point’.
Rebecca Rosen, of the Nuffield Trust think-tank, said attracting trainees was ‘only half the battle’ – and more needed to be done to keep qualified GPs.
‘Only half the battle’