GPs sign up after ad campaign on the buses

A SCOTTISH health board has managed to recruit 12 family doctors by advertising on buses in Leeds and Liverpool.

NHS Highland had struggled to recruit and retain GPs, even with a £10,000 golden hello for those in remote and rural locations.

So last year it launched a campaign hundreds of miles away in Liverpool and Leeds.

Adverts on the back of buses showed a photograph of a snowy mountain, saying: ‘For a better life, career, CV. Change here.’

Yesterday, the health board announced the £36,000 initiative had worked. Some 12 family doctors are now in post in the Highlands as a result of the marketing campaign.

NHS Highland chief executive Elaine Mead said: ‘The difficulties we have experienced in recruiting and retaining clinicians, particularly in some of our remote and rural areas, have been well documented.

‘Advertising GP vacancies by more traditional means is expensive and not always successful, and failing to recruit can necessitate the use of locum GPs at great expense.

‘We knew we had to try something different, which is why just over a year ago we mounted a major GP recruitment campaign for us. Thankfully, it has proved to be a tremendous success.’

Martine Scott, the board’s remote and rural programme manager, said the £36,000 cost of the campaign had been good value,.

She added: ‘We really did try to think outside the box to devise solutions to what had seemed an intractable problem.

‘Experience has shown that it worked and NHS Highland hopes to benefit from that experience as we look at addressing some of the other recruitment problems we face.’