Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many GPs have left the NHS since June 2022.

The table below shows the number of fully qualified general practitioners (GPs) who left the National Health Service between March 2022 and March 2023, the latest month for which the data is available:

While GPs leave the NHS, new doctors join general practice and there are 1,900 more than in 2019. Measures to refine pension tax will help to retain experienced GPs.

Notes:

- Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) refers to the proportion of full-time contracted hours that the post holder is contracted to work. 1 would indicate they work a full set of hours (37.5), 0.5 that they worked half time. In GPs in Training Grades’ contracts 1 FTE = 40 hours and in this table these FTEs have been converted to the standard wMDS measure of 1 FTE = 37.5 hours for consistency.

- Figures shown do not include staff working in prisons, army bases, educational establishments, specialist care centres including drug rehabilitation centres, walk-in centres and other alternative settings outside of traditional general practice such as urgent treatment centres and minor injury units.

- It is not recommended that comparisons be made between quarterly or monthly figures (e.g. Mar 2016 to Sept 2016) due to the unknown effect of seasonality on workforce numbers. Any such comparisons should therefore be treated with extreme caution.

- The data shows GPs who joined and/or left the cohort workforce between the beginning and end of each specified time period.

- A leaver is a GP whose identifying information was present in the relevant dataset at the beginning but not at the end of the specified time period.

- Please note that these figures do not capture GP migration between practices during this period.

- In addition, 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.