General Practitioners
(asked on 24th January 2023) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of GPs (a) retiring and (b) leaving the profession in each of the last five years.
As noted in the Government’s response to Question 132452, we remain committed to growing the workforce.
The number of general practitioners (GPs) leaving the profession in each of the last five years is shown in the table below.
Data on the number of GPs retiring is not held.
Period | Fully qualified GP leavers, FTE | Fully qualified GP leavers, headcount |
September 2017 - September 2018 | 2,676 | 3,891 |
September 2018 - September 2019 | 2,430 | 3,546 |
September 2019 - September 2020 | 2,242 | 3,385 |
September 2020 - September 2021 | 1,995 | 3,095 |
September 2021 - September 2022 | 2,351 | 3,657 |
The data shows GPs who left the cohort workforce between the beginning and end of each specified time period.
These figures do not capture GP migration between practices during this period.
Note: Due to data quality, a GP recorded as a leaver in these figures may have left one practice and joined another practice with poor data completion. In instances such as this, a GP will be incorrectly recorded as a leaver due to the identifying information no longer being present in the dataset. Conversely, a GP could appear in the practice cohort as a joiner but may have joined from a practice with poor data completion rather than being a new addition to the GP workforce.