Helen Salisbury: Redefining full time work in general practice

A recent paper in the British Journal of General Practice brought the good news that we have twice as many full time GPs as we thought.1 The less good news is that this hasn’t come about through an increase in posts filled but by making a more realistic estimate of the time it takes to do our work.A GP’s work is counted in sessions, with each session equating to a morning or afternoon in practice. The BMA model contract for salaried GPs deems a session to last four hours and 10 minutes,2 and the standard NHS definition of full time working is 37.5 hours a week, meaning that a full time contract should involve working nine sessions a week. As every practising GP knows, each session takes much longer than that, and any doctor doing nine sessions is superhuman.The research looked at data from serial surveys conducted over 11 years…
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