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Publication of GP earnings – giving the whole picture

This month Dr Elliott Singer, Londonwide LMCs’ Medical Director, explains how practices can add context to their publication of earnings webpage to show patients the value provided by general practice.

With the financial year ending, it is time for practices to publish partner and employed GPs’ earnings on their websites. We all know the drill by now and it can still feel somewhat unfair to single out just one part of practice’s outgoings to present to the public.

But there is nothing in the requirements that say you only have to publish these details and stop there – you are free to add factual context. So, why not carry on and add some more details about how your practice is good value for money?

I have produced an extended template for practices to put on their websites, with the first section covering the information a practice is contractually required to provide, the second section covering per patient income and the third explaining how GP working patterns are different from many other jobs. The text is also downloadable as a Word document which you can populate, then copy and paste into a webpage.

My template text reads as follows:

 

GP Earnings for [practice]

There is a contractual obligation for GP practices to publish the earnings of their GPs working in the practice.

The average pay for GPs working in [practice] in the last financial year was [£XXX] before tax and national insurance.

This is for [x] full time and [x] part time GPs.

How much is the practice paid?

Publishing this information is not a contractual requirement, but we feel it is useful for patients to know:

is paid [£XX] per patient per year.  This amount is to provide unlimited care to you and includes all the expenses of running the practice, from salaries, to telephones, electricity, stationary etc. Any profit left over is divided among the partners. 

Think about it – how does [£xx] for unlimited GP care compare to other expenses you could accrue over the year?

• A single cardiology out-patient appointment £166
• BT’s basic fibre broadband package £300
• A Netflix premium subscription £120
• A medium Costa Coffee cappuccino every working day of the year £637
• A pint of beer once a week (average London price) £218.20
• A zone 1-2 annual travel card £1,364

We are doing our best to provide a high standard of service for very little money, we know that this level of resourcing is not ideal, but hopefully you can see we’re doing everything we can.

What do the GP earning figures mean?

GP practices are required to publish mean (average) earnings for all GPs in a practice. This includes partners, who jointly own the practice, and GPs who are employees of the practice. It does not differentiate between part-time and full-time working. The amounts are before tax and national insurance. This means that the earning figure cannot even be used to compare one practice to another.

Most people consider working full-time to equate to a 40-hour working week, GPs work far more than this amount and typically work 10 to 12-hour days, paid at a fixed rate per half-day worked. So a GP who is paid to work for three days per week is likely to cover the same number of hours as a worker in a different sector does in five days.

 

Download this template as a Word file, to fill out the text and paste into a web page.

Last updated : 21 Mar 2018

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