Rammya Mathew: The fight to retain GPs must start today

The Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme was introduced in 2019 to help expand the general practice workforce.1 The scheme financially incentivises groups of practices to employ staff from as many as 17 different professional groups including pharmacists, physicians’ associates, and first contact physiotherapists. The arguments in favour of growing a multidisciplinary team in primary care focus on the benefits of having a greater “skill mix” and there being too few GPs to safely manage the current workload in primary care.Some roles in particular have added great value to the practice team. But all roles in the scheme work within a defined scope of practice and under the supervision of a GP. A downside of this is that it can lead to fragmented care. Patients rarely come to see us with single health issues; more commonly they have multiple health issues that span across body systems, and these don’t always neatly fall…
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