GPS in Britain are among the highest earners in Western world
BRITAIN’S GPS are among the best paid in the Western world, an international study has shown.
It found that family doctors now earn more than three times as much as the average employee.
GP partners typically earn more than £115,000 a year for full-time work, with most family doctors opting for parttime hours. Despite this, the country is facing a growing shortage, with mounting concern about how NHS hospitals, already under unprecedented strain, will cope as GP surgeries close for Christmas. Patients’ groups said the figures were “extraordinary”.
Pay has risen substantially since the introduction of a GP contract under the last Labour government, which allowed them to give up responsibility for out-of-hours services.
Before 2004, when the new contract came in, GP partners earned around £85,000 a year, but in recent years, there have been growing shortages of family doctors, prompting the Government to promise an extra 6,000 GPS.
The figures come amid warnings of waits of up to nine weeks for some patients, with just one permanent GP for 11,000 residents at one practice.
The Prime Minister has pledged to make the NHS a priority, promising 50,000 more nurses, whose pay starts at just £24,000, with average wages the same as UK earnings.
The report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) showed the gulf between the earnings of family doctors, and those of the average worker is the second highest across all 27 industrialised nations examined. GPS in the UK are paid 3.1 times as much as average earnings. Only Germany has a higher ratio.
The international research also showed growing dissatisfaction among patients in the UK with the amount of time they get for their appointment.
Britain is lagging in the bottom half of the league table, with 84.9 per cent satisfied with the amount of time allowed for their consultation, down from 88.8 per cent in 2010.
The UK has the second lowest number of doctors in Europe, compared with its population – 2.8 doctors per
1,000 people, compared with an OECD average of 3.5 doctors. In Europe, only Poland has fewer medics, with 2.4 per 100,000 people.
Rising numbers of doctors are taking early retirement, prompted by a growing pensions crisis. Almost 1,000 GPS and hospital consultants opted to retire early last year, compared with 384 a decade ago. The trend follows changes in pension and tax rules, which mean the cap on how much savers can amass without being taxed has fallen from £1.8million in 2012 to £1million.
The report showed that Britain is one of the most reliant countries on overseas doctors, with 28.7 per cent of medics trained abroad, the fifth highest figure in Europe.
Gaetan Lafortune, OECD health expert, said: “The differences between the UK and other countries are very striking, particularly when we you look at how many GPS are retiring early.”
Dr Richard Vautrey, British Medical Association GP committee chairman, said: “This has come after a decade of real-terms pay cuts.”
Separately, it emerged yesterday that one million women in England do not have access to a regular female GP. While female GPS slightly outnumber male counterparts in the UK, in some areas as many as three in four are male, NHS figures seen by The Times showed.