Is there a General Practice Workforce crisis in Wakefield?

GP numbers nationally are falling. Below is a chart of wte GPs in England:


As you can see they peaked in 2013 and have fallen since. However, Wakefield is bucking the trend in that our numbers of clinical staff have increased over the last three years. Practices have submitted data to a workforce survey over the last three years and it shows increasing numbers of all staff in general practices in Wakefield. Indeed Wakefield has the most GPs, GP Nurses and administration staff of any CCG in West Yorkshire! The data from the workforce survey is tabulated below:


Workload in General Practice continues to increase. Below is a chart of the number of consultations by doctors and nurses in practices in Wakefield that use SystmOne.




As you can see the total number of consultations has increased over the last five years. The number of consultations by GP's has reduced and those by GP nurses has increased. This is particularly relevant to the question of whether we are in a workforce crisis in Wakefield. We are unlikely to be able to recruit any more GP's, the increase in work in general practice is being done by GP nurses and the concern is that the GP nurse workforce is getting older. Nearly 30% of GP nurses are over 55 years of age and be able to retire.

So, the general practice workforce is currently not in crisis in Wakefield, but with more work being done by GP nurses and the GP nurse workforce getting older we are looking at a crisis about to develop!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What does the latest workforce survey say about staffing in Wakefield?

Image
The latest quarterly survey of general practice staff in practices across Yorkshire and Humber was published last week. There were several themes from the data: The number of practices continues to reduce with mergers and consolidation of practices. In the last quarter the number of practices again reduced from 765 to 757 The affect of initiatives to encourage newly qualified nurses to have a career in general practice can be seen with 12% of GP nurses under 34 years of age The number of GPs under 34 has reduced from 23% to 20%. This might because newly qualified GPs are not taking up posts locally. It raises the interesting questions about where they actually are going? The report also shows the continued huge inter practice variation. Of 136 practices that commented about their risks and mitigation's only one practice said it had no workforce risks. The risks could be summarises under the following headings: Recruitment / retention /retirement Workload Resource co...
Read more

Wakefield General Practice Training Events Calendar is live!

Image
One of the roles for the Wakefield General Practice Workforce Development Academy is to facilitate education and training across Wakefield for all of the Wakefield General Practice workforce. We have set up a calendar of training events. It is publicly accessible on Google calendars, its not on Skyline so you don't need any passwords or logins to access it. It is a Google calendar so you could add it to your Google login if you wanted to, but you don't need to. At the moment we just have TARGET dates for the next 12 months. And by the way wasn't the GP TARGET at Pontefract great yesterday. We certainly had a full house, can you spot yourself in the picture! To access the calendar click here  and if you have any events planned you want to add click here to email me with them.
Read more