We are sinking The NHS is haemorrhaging talent – to retirement, emigration, the private sector and leaving medicine entirely. General Practice is perhaps worst hit with 40% of GPs planning to leave in the next 5 years and the shortage of GPs making it insanely difficult to access GP care. And a 2.1% annual uplift … Read more
The NHS has many strengths and has been a remarkably resilient organisation since it was founded in 1948. But if we want it to continue, we need to be aware of its weaknesses and what to guard against. So, what would someone who deliberately wanted to wreck the NHS do? Encourage patients to overuse NHS … Read more
There’s a lot of talk about fixing the GP workload crisis by charging patients and using price to influence supply and demand. It seems to work for Dentists and reducing plastic carrier bag use but is it actually that simple or is reality a bit more complicated? Making a dramatic change like this could have … Read more
This is the elephant in the room for GP recruitment and retention. Over the last 10 years the job of being a GP has been systematically trashed by successive governments and by the press. The warnings that doctors would leave General Practice have been ignored and now the chickens are coming home to roost with … Read more
Working out a Practice Strategy can seem daunting but it is an essential task. It starts with not doing stupid things that make a fast buck but eventually wreck your business (that’s what they call short-termism). But the fun part is discovering your superpower and then leveraging the living daylights out of it. That’s when the magic … Read more
One of the characteristics of modern life is that we get so caught up in endless activity, that we never really think about where we are going, and what it is all for. Sometimes that’s because we feel we are too busy just keeping afloat, but even when things are going well, it seems self … Read more
Losing an experienced team member is a catastrophe. But how do you keep them when you can’t just throw money at the problem? Building a culture where your team feels they belong and that they have a say in their work is critical. And the most effective way you can do this is to make … Read more
It was the summer of 2019 and we were in trouble. Since the retirement of our senior partner in 2017 we had been trying to find her replacement. And we had failed. We were a nice practice, with a nice income, and nice patients in a nice neighbourhood – and nobody wanted to join us. … Read more
The Pandemic has been a rough time for all practices, and the biggest problem we have had has been the crushing workload. Some have turned to Doctor First, Total Triage or AskMyGP but many surgeries still report out-of-control demand and difficulties coping. We had strong long-term relationships with our patients, and they tended not to … Read more
There is a lot of talk about promoting self care. But much of this seems to be telling patients off for seeking help with genuine problems. Or else giving them lots of bewildering choices and telling them it is up to them to decide. If we treat patients as overly demanding customers then that is … Read more