Burnham-On-Sea and Berrow Medical Centres are continuing to ‘struggle’ to recruit enough new doctors, it has emerged this week.
The centres have “adopted new and innovative ways of looking after patients” in order to try and free up as much GP time as possible in response to the problem.
Debbie Hale, Management Partner at Burnham & Berrow Medical Centre, told Burnham-On-Sea.com: “Burnham & Berrow Medical Centre has been struggling to recruit new doctors for several years.”
“This is a theme that is repeated across the NHS as current GPs retire or leave the service early and, until now, there have not been sufficient new doctors coming into the system to replace them.”
“Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said in a comment on the latest report by three leading think tanks on NHS workforce figures that ‘the latest workforce figures show a drop in full time GPs of 1,400 since Jeremy Hunt promised an increase of 5,000 doctors’.”
“Over the last few years, Burnham & Berrow Medical Centre have literally spent thousands of pounds trying to recruit GPs with limited success.”
“This has been through both local and national advertising, attending GP recruitment fairs and via recruitment agencies.”
“We have also spent thousands of pounds on Locum GPs and, whilst we are fortunate to have very good Locums working with the Practice, they are more expensive than either GP Partners or Salaried GPs and there is an issue with continuity of care when they work more on an ad hoc basis.”
“We organise Locums several months in advance and do our best to ensure sufficient sessions are planned each day, however, this summer was particularly difficult with very few Locums available and this has had a knock-on effect whilst we try to catch up.”
She added: “Rather than struggle on regardless, the Practice has adopted new and innovative ways of looking after our patients, thereby freeing up as much GP time as possible for those patients who really do need GP input – a large number of patient contacts do not need to be with a GP and are more appropriate with another Healthcare Professional.”
“We have a brilliant Healthcare team including Long Term Condition Nurses, Treatment Room Nurses, HCAs, Pharmacist, Paramedics and MSK Practitioners as well as an excellent and supportive admin team. At the time of writing this – late on Monday afternoon, we have routine GP appointments available to book this Friday.”
“We are continuing to look at ways to manage our patients care that is safe and effective whilst continuing to actively recruit to GP vacancies. Somerset CCG have recognised the challenge of providing healthcare to an increasing population going forward and have developed the ‘Fit for my Future‘ project to work with local people in Somerset and healthcare providers to identify different ways of managing this.”
