General practitioners like me save hospitals from being overrun. But years of underfunding have led to a chronic shortage
- Tom Holdsworth is a GP and clinical director of a primary care network in Sheffield
In summer 2020 I had been working at the same GP practice for 10 years and had seen the workload increase steadily. Each Monday morning I would start at 8am to get through the list of 50 phone calls and to see those needing urgent face-to-face review. I would finish my morning list just before 3pm and start my afternoon surgery 10 minutes later. At 6pm I would start looking at paperwork and around 8pm I would leave for home with the day’s work unfinished. Despite a 12-hour shift, it still felt as though the job was only half done.
For a long time, the Sunday evening dread had been arriving earlier in the weekend. On a Saturday in June last year I was due to go with my family to the park for my son’s birthday, but all was not well. Choking with emotion, I muttered some excuses and disappeared to work my way through the backlog of emails and blood results. That’s when it hit me: things were so bad, I couldn’t even be there for my son’s birthday on a day off. A few months later I walked away from the practice, to the sadness of many patients and the great distress of my GP partners.
