No doubt your inboxes have been weighed down with the debate on the “2% pay rise for GPs”. Is it 2%, 1%, 3.4% or 4.2%? Of course it’s nothing of the sort.
It’s a contract uplift to independent contractors. If you buy a pencil, it comes out of your drawings. If you save a pencil, it goes into your drawings. I’m afraid the general public don’t understand this, but never mind.
There is no perfect model and of course it has its drawbacks, but I think the ability to run your own business is one of the great strengths of UK general practice. GPs have huge freedom to determine their own business performance, and therefore their profits and drawings.
Alongside improving patient service, one of our explicit goals is to make GP practice owners more profitable. Some of you seem rather coy about this, strangely, but I see it in very simple terms: why else would you pay us?
Because business owners take home the difference between income and expenses, they know that they can increase their incomes vastly more than 2% by investing in a machine to make pencils – I’ve over-extended the analogy.
Pencils are cheap but the expensive bit of the GP business is the GP. So the game is to make the GPs 30% or 40% more productive.
We are drawing near to Hancock’s Holy Trinity of “improving outcomes, helping clinicians and saving money”
Meanwhile there’s a monstrous failure: NHS England can’t persuade enough foreign trained GPs to come here. They wanted 2,000 no doubt at vast expense, and they are under half the target. They are looking in the wrong place. We already have the GPs. And by enabling them to be more efficient, and more profitable, we’ll have plenty.
It is a national scandal that a developed nation should steal the trained workforce from other countries who may have far fewer GPs per head than the UK.
We can do better.
Regards,
Harry Longman
PS I loved this tweet earlier today from @dave_dlt “Heck of a day, 4 sessions down then one partner needing to get away unexpectedly yet 1650 building calm and quiet”.
We are seeing partners shed locums and salaried sessions then still get away on time and enjoy the sunshine dividend.
GP pay, rations and recruitment
No doubt your inboxes have been weighed down with the debate on the “2% pay rise for GPs”. Is it 2%, 1%, 3.4% or 4.2%? Of course it’s nothing of the sort.
It’s a contract uplift to independent contractors. If you buy a pencil, it comes out of your drawings. If you save a pencil, it goes into your drawings. I’m afraid the general public don’t understand this, but never mind.
There is no perfect model and of course it has its drawbacks, but I think the ability to run your own business is one of the great strengths of UK general practice. GPs have huge freedom to determine their own business performance, and therefore their profits and drawings.
Alongside improving patient service, one of our explicit goals is to make GP practice owners more profitable. Some of you seem rather coy about this, strangely, but I see it in very simple terms: why else would you pay us?
Because business owners take home the difference between income and expenses, they know that they can increase their incomes vastly more than 2% by investing in a machine to make pencils – I’ve over-extended the analogy.
Pencils are cheap but the expensive bit of the GP business is the GP. So the game is to make the GPs 30% or 40% more productive.
We are drawing near to Hancock’s Holy Trinity of “improving outcomes, helping clinicians and saving money”
Meanwhile there’s a monstrous failure: NHS England can’t persuade enough foreign trained GPs to come here. They wanted 2,000 no doubt at vast expense, and they are under half the target. They are looking in the wrong place. We already have the GPs. And by enabling them to be more efficient, and more profitable, we’ll have plenty.
It is a national scandal that a developed nation should steal the trained workforce from other countries who may have far fewer GPs per head than the UK.
We can do better.
Regards,
Harry Longman
PS I loved this tweet earlier today from @dave_dlt “Heck of a day, 4 sessions down then one partner needing to get away unexpectedly yet 1650 building calm and quiet”.
We are seeing partners shed locums and salaried sessions then still get away on time and enjoy the sunshine dividend.
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