Why become a private GP?

What are the benefits?

There are a number of benefits to becoming a private GP for both you and the patients you see. These include:

Why are GPs turning to private practice?

Most GPs trained as primary care specialists under the impression that they would be able to interact regularly with patients, delivering personalised and holistic care as part of an interdisciplinary team, to a manageable list of regular patients.

In recent years, the restrictions of NHS primary care funding, coupled with a growing and ageing population, have meant that this vision of a typical primary care has all but disappeared.  

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NHS GPs

Today’s NHS GPs are faced with a myriad of challenges. For GP partners, in addition to clinical responsibilities, there is a long list of practice management to contend with, including hiring, HR, technology, customer service, financial pressure and evolving funding mechanisms.  

For GP locums, there is little sense of teamwork or collaboration, and a risk of de-skilling with work often reduced to protocol driven risk-mitigation.  

For all NHS GPs, the sheer disparity between supply and demand, means that clinical interactions are increasingly digitalised (e.g., triage), short (<5 minute appointments) and complex as only the most complicated cases are escalated to GPs, with easy work completed by nurses, pharmacists or HCAs.

How does private practice compare?

Private general practice offers an entirely different environment, freed from the restriction of NHS funding constraints.

With patients funding their own care, clinicians are free to determine the way in which they manage their patients’ care.

This can look like extended appointment times, face-to-face care (digital triage has yet to be shown to be valuable in a private context) and freedom from financial constraints imposed within the NHS such greater prescribing freedom.