“Good rewards” needed for GP recruitment

The chairman of the British Medical Association’s general practitioners’ committee, Dr Hamish Meldrum, has said that “good rewards” were needed in order to attract greater numbers of GPs.

GPs have been the subject of intense media attention in the last two days after it was revealed that some doctors can earn up to ?250,000 per year.

However, Dr Meldrum has defended GPs’ earnings and has said that their average salary is a “bit below” ?100,000. He explained: “There will be a few GPs who are at the top of these and primarily they are getting that sort of money for actually running quite a complex business rather than actually providing health care.”

Niall Dickson, the chief executive of health charity the King’s Fund, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the average patient would find it “astonishing” that their GP could be earning up to ?250,000.

The health minister, Patricia Hewitt, told the same programme that the new GP contract would ensure that practices would need to do more to ensure higher earnings. She commented that the ?300 million estimated overspend on the new contract was due to “GPs … doing far more in response to the new contract”.

Last year the Department of Health inaugurated a new system of “payment by results” and have implemented several changes already. It says that it will provide fairness and transparency to heath funding.

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