Confessions of a GP

The future?

If you get a bunch of GPs in a room together, it won’t be long before they start moaning about their jobs. This never ceases to amaze me, as I think we have it fairly good at the moment. We are paid well, work good hours and have an interesting and rewarding occupation. Despite this, GPs spend a great deal of time complaining about almost everything. I even heard a couple of GP partners complaining about how high their tax bill was going to be this year. I couldn’t help but point out that if they were going to earn 120K, then they couldn’t really expect any sympathy for paying a bit more to the treasury come April!

Some of my older patients reminisce fondly about the time when their own GP was on call 24 hours a day and was always on hand for an emergency visit. My uncle was one of those GPs. He would disappear from family dinners to deliver a baby, get home at 5 a.m. and then start morning surgery at 8 a.m. with a huge line of patients queuing out into the street. There is a wonderfully romantic, old-fashioned idea about that bygone time of the loyal and dedicated family GP. My auntie still has her late husband’s ex-patients stopping her in the street and telling her what a wonderful doctor he was. My uncle had no life outside of his work and rarely spent any time with his family. He missed his children growing up and dropped down dead shortly after retiring. I wouldn’t want to have had his life. My generation of young GPs is mostly much better at finding a balance between work and home life. I’m sorry that my patients have to see a GP they don’t know if they need a doctor on a Sunday night or while I’m on holiday, but I have a life too.

All in all, I’m quite positive about the future of general practice. There are always scaremongering stories about big supermarket chains setting up surgeries and shipping in lots of Eastern European doctors to take over our jobs. I think this is unlikely. Yes, patients grumble about struggling to get through on the phone or their doctor running late, but individually most GPs are quite well liked and valued by their patients. My experience of patients is that they are a fairly loyal bunch. I’m not sure that a huge number would be lured away to Tesco if they opened surgeries at the back of their stores. I can see that some would be attracted by the convenience of supermarket doctors, especially if they ran a 24-hour service, but ultimately most patients like the familiarity and friendliness of their local practices. Although there is a lot of potential profit to be made out of running GP surgeries, there is also a hell of a lot of red tape and hoops to jump through. I’m not sure whether Tesco would really want the bother. I may eat my words someday but I think that our jobs and future are fairly secure.