The issue of retention and recruitment of local GPs is a “crisis”, a Tower Hamlets Council meeting heard.
As part of their review on “workforce shortages across health and social care,” the council has identified a “GP and nurse workforce crisis”, the “impact of the pandemic” and “waiting list size” as its main challenges.
Dr. Khyati Bakhai, a GP and guest speaker at the meeting last week, claimed there is now roughly “half the amount of GPs” trying to meet “40 per cent higher” demand.
A council report outlined the upward trend in GP waiting lists in Tower Hamlets:
This reflects a UK-wide trend. Since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, NHS waiting lists have grown by 70%. Meanwhile, the number of salaried GPs across the NHS has decreased by nearly 10% since 2020.
Bakhai said: “It [the pandemic] was really hard for GPs… We’ve seen more staff leave from burnout post-pandemic than the last 10 years.”
Another guest speaker at the council meeting, Alison Arnaud, a principal of New City College, which trains health and social care workers, said issues around recruiting also had a “great deal to do with negative press.”
Arnaud also emphasised how this recruitment problem will only get worse: “There is now a significant difference in what the borough needs and the interest we are finding amongst younger people.”
NCC data shows there are currently only 91 full-time students in health and social care in Tower Hamlets. Victoria Torona, deputy group curriculum director at New City College, said that those figures “should be double that.” Torona said it is particularly difficult to get men interested in the profession: “Traditionally within the borough, there is the prevailing thought that the boys must do business or accountancy and the girls must do child or healthcare.”
Francesca Okosi, chief people and culture officer at NHS London, stressed that Tower Hamlets has the lowest medium age in England: “We have an opportunity to get a hold of the largest amount of 16-year-olds that are coming into the workforce.”
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Virginia Patania, manager of the Jubilee Street Practice in Tower Hamlets, said the demand pressures on her practice were “difficult to levels that I have never experienced in my two decades in the NHS.”
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She said “post-pandemic health behaviours of citizens” were mostly to blame for the immense rise in GP demand. “There was such a bottleneck” during COVID and now work has to be “driven” away from hospitals, towards GP practices.
Patania said she had ”daily anxiety” trying to retain GPs under current conditions: “I never thought I would see the days when I am negotiating resignations into sabbaticals.”
“Before the pandemic when people went home at nine o’clock they had finished most of their work. Today they are going home… knowing there were hundreds of patients that never got through to you… It feels like rubbish to go home.”
She said that they are now stuck in a vicious cycle. GPs are overworked and under-motivated, so they are more likely to leave the practice, leaving remaining GPs even more overworked.
“Why would you want to work as a doctor right now? Do you want to work until 9 at night when your child is already asleep and have depression lambasting you?”
There are two main “tropes” that the media focused on.: “The first is about GPs not seeing patients… never at any point in time did GPs stop seeing patients.”
The second is about GP pay: “I don’t know where this myth comes from, with ‘fat cat’ GPs… I am paid as much money as a GP. I am significantly struggling to afford nursery bills.”
Speaking particularly to younger professionals, Patania did said, though: “Being a GP is a magnificent profession. You are embedded in the community… you will be working in the warmest, most sincere, devoted environments.”
