General Practitioners

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

My noble friend will know that pension policy is not one of my areas. There are early retirements from general practice but, as he pointed out, a number of those GPs come back either as locums or as part-time doctors. It is important to entice more of them back. That is why we aim to have 500 people going through our refresher scheme to bring GPs back into the service.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I was rather surprised to learn that the Government were trying to recruit more doctors from Australia, the very country to which a great many of our newly qualified doctors go for better pay and conditions. What are the Government doing to try to recoup the taxpayers’ money spent on their training? It is surprising that they go to developed countries such as Australia, and that we get no benefit from the cost of their training.

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

Some people will inevitably travel abroad after their training, but the vast majority of doctors who train in this country stay here. We have more GPs than ever in training. That is obviously the way to solve the long-term challenges of having the right workforce. However, the noble Baroness is absolutely right that we need to recruit from abroad in the short-to-medium term. The NHS has a recruitment target of 2,000 doctors via that route.