Please find below a message from Phil Morgan, Primary Care manager at Shropshire CCG with a request to complete a short survey around the GP workforce. Please take a few minutes to fill this in if you can. There is very little data available regarding the GP Locum workforce, which makes it very hard for Phil and his team to make accurate predictions about future workforce needs.
Thank you!
GPs invited to participate in Local GP Retention Fund Survey
NHS Shropshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has secured funding from NHS England to work with GPs to find ways of improving retention. Please help us by completing this survey www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/LocalGPRetentionFund – it should only take 5/10 minutes. More detail on the background and purpose of this project is below.
A consultation group, formed of GPs, Practice Managers and members of the Primary Care Team, reviewed how best to use the funding and the decision was made to commission a national GP training organisation to design and deliver a series of events for GPs. These events would aim to:
- identify, clarify and summarise issues which may lead GPs to consider leaving the profession early, and
- develop strategies (individual and collective) to address them, thereby decreasing the likelihood of GPs retiring early or leaving the profession
Whilst it is recognised that key issues around workload have previously been publicised nationally (please see BMA 2016 GP Survey), it is important to understand these from a more local perspective.
Given funding limitations, the CCG acknowledges that we cannot deliver fundamental change to GPs’ working lives. However, we are confident that creative use of this funding should enable the development of solutions to as many local issues as possible.
Your feedback is important – to ensure these events are focused on the key local issues, Shropshire GPs are invited to complete the survey.
The closing date for this survey is midnight on Monday 24 December 2018.
Responses to this survey are anonymous and confidential and the findings will be used by the GP training organisation to design the events.
If you have any queries about this survey please contact Phil Morgan, Primary Care Manager at the CCG philip.morgan3@nhs.net or phone 01743 277500 (ext 2550).
Thanks
Phil Morgan
Primary Care Manager
Shropshire Clinical Commissioning Group
William Farr House
Mytton Oak Road
Shrewsbury SY3 8XL
I replied to Phil Morgan:
Your email recent was forwarded to me.
There is a crisis with GP retention because multiple factors make the job unattractive as a career choice. Because of this increasing numbers of GPs are retiring early as soon as they can afford to, emigrating, leaving medicine, and those who do not are increasingly working as locums in order to gain control over their working lives. I cannot see any point in the planned events. We already know the factors that are driving GPs to quit: multiple surveys have been done and they all show the same. The CCG cannot “develop strategies (individual and collective)” to address these factors: they are all things that could only be changed at national level. As the CCG cannot change them, it cannot deliver the fundamental improvement in GPs’ working lives that would be required to solve or even reduce the problem of retention. The only local factor that you could change would be to scrap the STP which proposes massive transfer of additional work into primary care.
Given that, the greatest gain in local GP morale that you could achieve with the funding is not by holding meetings to find out what is already know and to express regret that you cannot change things for the better. You would gain more by simply dividing the money between the individual GPs working in Shropshire.
He replied:
Dear Doctor Taylor.
Thank you for your email. The overall approach to this piece of work (the survey and the, subsequent events) was planned with a small group of GPs and PMs. Although we did share some of your observations about the extent to which the CCG can influence the negative factors affecting GPs, we agreed that it is a worthwhile project as we think that, even in small ways, we can provide support to the system.
Given that our funding for this piece of work is £42k and we have around 250 GPs, that would mean £168 per GP. Our view is that using the money in the way we’ve described is the best way to get value for money.
I also forwarded these emails to Ian Rummens who replied that he agreed with me.
So £42k going down the drain achieving nothing other than demonstrating how deluded the CCG is – which if anything will further damage rather than improve GP morale.