GP experiences of their working lives in Greater Manchester; how do they differ from the national picture?
As part of our Primary Care Workforce study, we looked at the work completed by University of Manchester who have been surveying the working lives of general practitioners (GPs) in England through The National GP Worklife Survey (GPWLS) for the past 19 years. We took the sample of GPs targeted from this project and boosted this to include all GPs in GM. The aim of the boosted sample was to compare the work-life experience of GPs in GM to that of GPs in the rest of England, and to provide an estimate of the number of GM-based GPs intending to leave their posts in the next five years. Responses were received from 18.8% (1915) of the GM GPs.
Findings suggested that in terms of experiences of their working lives, including job satisfaction, pressures at work, job characteristics and future work intentions, the findings in the GM sample are similar to the national picture. However, there were some small key differences:
- GM GPs reported greater satisfaction with their hours of work as well as having greater flexibility and less pressure from long working hours than the overall national sample.
- GM GPs reported being more worried about patient complaints and litigation in comparison to the national sample.
- GM GPs were somewhat less likely to agree that their work provided a variety of interesting things and were marginally less likely to agree that they received clear feedback about how well they were doing their job.
- GM GPs reported being less likely to leave direct patient care and less likely to leave medical work entirely.
You can read a more detailed report on our work here.
The full report from this study can be found here