PRACTICE LEAFLET

Average GP Earnings

Our contract with the NHS requires us to publish the average GP earnings at the Surgery.  

This is a politically driven requirement and serves no purpose and is not in anyway useful as an indicator of anything remotely patient or care related. 

Every year NHS England reduces the funding for GP surgeries as the funding changes that they make are far below the increase in costs of pay rises and the costs of running the surgery.

This means each year we have less money to support your local care. In the meantime, NHS England requires more work from every staff member to achieve this reduced amount.

NHS England does this by changing targets related to our funding by making them more difficult and not funding the work required to achieve them. 

The cost of living pressures that the whole UK is experiencing currently have been completely ignored by the government making the next year of funding even more difficult.  The core amount of income per patient that is received by the practice has gone down in real terms for many years.

NHS England require that the net earnings of doctors engaged in the practice is publicised by 31 March 2024. It should be noted that the prescribed method of calculating earnings is misleading because it takes no account of how much time doctors spend working in the practice and it cannot be used for any judgement about GP earnings, nor to make any comparisons with other practices.

As this is an average figure it cannot meaningfully be compared with figures from other GP surgeries as they may have a different number of full time and part-time GPs.  For example if they have lots of GPs working just 1 day per week their figure will be much lower - even though they may be paying higher salaries...  This figure in no way indicates the level of funding or the level of costs that the surgery requires to function.

Even though this figure is meaningless it it complex to calculate and has required a a significant additional cost to the practice for an accountant to provide it.  This is one of the many ways that our costs are increased for no patient benefit but for which we have to pay.  Every penny that this takes is money that we cannot put towards staff and services.

The Partners / Owners of the surgery have unlimited financial liability - which means that they lose everything if there are issues with the surgery finances (unlike limited companies) 

The average pay for GPs working in Ball Tree Surgery in the last financial year (until April 2023) was £73,012 before tax and National Insurance.

This is for 2 full time GPs, 12 part time GPs and 1 long term locum GP who worked in the practice for six months or more.

Training time to become a GP = 10 years+ and numerous ongoing costs assocated with training and education and ongoing professional registration and appraisals.

Salary for UK Members of Parliament (who regularly have voted to reduce the income of GP practices) before they have generous expenses and allowances = £84,000+

Training time to become an MP....

The figure bears no relation to the number of actual hours worked by clinical members of our teams.