GP recruitment and retention

As a GP registrar, I was rather downhearted after reading the letter by Dr Glasspool in the March BJGP.¹ Is it that bad? Are we really in crisis? Are all the GPs retiring, locuming, and emigrating? Dr Glasspool helpfully points us to social media for a true picture, and it seems he is right! A search on Twitter for ‘GP recruitment’, ‘GP workload’, and ‘GP crisis’ finds 42 negative tweets just in the last 7 days, most, seemingly from doctors. ‘We are crumbling under the pressure’, ‘74% unmanageable workload’, and ‘We need to have a ceiling on our workload — a GP colleague had 105 phone calls and 15 patients to see while on call — that’s unsafe’, were just some of the things freely available to find on Twitter. A search on The Huffington Post finds two demoralising articles.^2,3 Should I change career? Is there any hope?

Then, just yesterday, I attended the Royal College of General Practitioners’ (RCGP) GP recruitment event in Hull. I was asked to go, to answer any questions the delegates had about the GP training scheme. I sat down and listened to the speakers, four GPs from the Yorkshire area. I was struck by the vigour, energy, and enthusiasm they had for their work; they clearly loved general practice, and spoke with passion about all aspects of being a GP. Even when asked by one of the delegates about the worst part of their job, there was no hint of burnout or unmanageable workloads or stress in their answers. Any doubts I had over my chosen career had vanished by the end of the evening.

I am aware that these RCGP events are exactly what ‘saddens’ Dr Glasspool who argues that the College is wrongly encouraging students into ‘a speciality which is currently broken’, but the four speakers were not politicians using ‘spin’ to put on a brave face before an election; they were honest, hard-working doctors who simply shared their passion for general practice.