Newly qualified GPs now working in Tesco!

[chocolatenutcase]

This makes me so sad. The state of nhs funding particularly funding to primary care means that newly qualified GPs can't get jobs in the U.K. Sad? No actually I am absolutely furious that the British public are denied decent health care.

Yes, there needs to be more publicity. It is shocking how little this is mentioned in the media.

Why did he/she not stay working in healthcare? Why go from a Drs job to Tesco, why not stay in the health service while you apply for GP positions?

Because as a doctor you can't swap from one role to another.

Someone qualified as a GP can work as:
A GP
A junior doctor in hospital - but only at very junior levels

Bizarrely hospitals are full of nurses and paramedics who have done additional training whose jobs are often advertised as 'working at junior doctor level' - a doctor can't actually apply for those

Neither can they apply for any physician associate roles despite having way more training and experience

So as a doctor you are pretty stuck. You can be a doctor in the specialty you trained in but not much else. and if those roles aren't available but you have kids and rent/mortgage to pay then you need to pay the bills somehow urgently.

@RheaRend because dr jobs anywhere in the health service are drying up. As a GP trainee they could only do certain jobs -GP or foundation Dr jobs. But as foundation doctors are finding as @mumsneedwine post, there are no jobs or locum posts for them either.
There is the odd shift for online Dr sites but again these are drying up.
Hence getting anything that can pay the bills but is flexible to leave easily.

But surely they were in a DR job before. You do not step out of uni into GP. You do many years of working as a DR in different roles before that.

It’s a business. tired, burnt out. Senior partners in a Gp practice are responsible for budgets and government targets.

locus gp on the other hand equals do a clinic for more money and then leave.
same as agency nurses
The government say they will recruit more NHS workers but each trust and Go surgery has a budget which the government has told them they can spend up to and if they exceed that they want to know why.

My point is, why leave the DR he/she had if there was no GP job secured. Why not just say in the DR job until a GP on came along.

You can't stay in your training role until a GP job comes along.

At the end of your training, you qualify as a GP and your contract is finished.

All junior doctor roles are fixed term contracts for training, you can't just say 'oh I think I'll stay here', the job is up and they are training the next person.

@RheaRend doesn't work like that. The GP had finished training so needs to apply for a new job. Most Drs have to reapply for jobs every few years, that's how training works. Old job ceases to exist.

@RheaRend you finish uni and apply for 2 years foundation training. Then you have to apply again for specialist training. If you don't get on a specialist training programme you might not have a job to progress to. Once you have finished specialist training (in this case GP) you can no longer stay on that programme and have to apply for a job. This is where the problem lies - there are not enough GP vacancies for the number of trainees completing their specialist GP training. And no locum jobs either.

Surgeries full of Physician Associates because the government gave money to employ them instead of proper doctors. That's what that doctor was berating Sunak about.
These are often failed med school applicants who did a superficial 2 year training course with 100% pass rate. Now posing as doctors.
Meanwhile doctors who have 15 years training can't find posts.

@Pritas has nailed it.

So that means if it applied to my job.

I'd leave my teaching job...have no income as I trained as a head. Then would have to apply for a headship, if not there was no teacher jobs or even TA jobs I could do?

What a stupid system! Why can they not work and train? Why do they have to be unemployed?

@RheaRend yes exactly that. For a teacher - finish uni and find a teacher training course. Once finished that find a NQT post. Assuming fixed term contract then have to apply for a substantive teacher post. Say then that post was a 8 year training to be a head teacher. Once the 8 years were up then find a head teacher post. At any of the break points you can't stay in the post or go back. You have to hope there's supply work available. Tbh it's always been like that but way back when I trained, there was a lot more flexibility in training.

And they do work and train at the same time. Thats what junior doctors are and do. The years of training and service provision before being a fully qualified GP or consultant.

If you look at the actual job descriptions you will find that very few of them are actually GPs. They just include the word general or practitioner in the title. My wife is a GP. She knows there is a shortage of posts at the moment but there is no shortage of candidates.

It takes longer than that. And my point stands, unless they have done the last few steps then they are not qualified.

This is exactly what is happening. They are massively under qualified and are just there to reduce the quality of the health care system. This way, people will go private but we will be paying the same amount of tax. Ridiculous.

www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/21/four-in-five-locum-gps-in-england-unable-to-find-work-bma-study-finds

How could we possibly have got from a situation 2 -3 years ago where we had a huge GP shortage to this?? 4 in 5 unable to find work. The sector has not just embraced accepting non GP staff to do GP work, it has used them to decimate the service under our noses.

And did we notice at the time? We did not.

There is an opinion piece on this as well -
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/20/physician-doctor-reckless-experiment-nhs-associates

What if your ‘physician’ wasn’t actually a doctor at all? Beware this new reckless experiment

Basically the public is being lied to about physicians assistants who know SFA compared to doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, pharmacists, paramedics and health care assistants who all know the limits of their expertise.

What if your ‘physician’ wasn’t actually a doctor at all? Beware this new reckless experiment

Basically the public is being lied to about physicians assistants who know SFA compared to doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, pharmacists, paramedics and health care assistants who all know the limits of their expertise.

This is also the lie being peddled when the government claims that it has provided X million more GP appointments. What they really mean is that there are more appointments available at GP surgeries, but they lie by omission by not then clarifying that the appointments are with physicians assistants rather than with qualified GPs.