I read an interesting article today about how many general practitioners in medicine are trying to escape a full-time job as a GP and into at least some of their life in a part-time job as either a private GP or even something else.
Previously I had mixed feelings about this sort of thing. I could be quite blasé and think, well, you chose what you've chosen, and you should stick to your path.
For the record, I worked as an NHS general dental practitioner from 1997 until 2006.
I continued to work in the NHS as a specialist practitioner and business owner from 2006 to 2015.
What I watched, though, was how the monster of the system made it more and more difficult to be who you wanted to be or to do what you wanted to do.
At the same time as this, other jobs in other fields catapulted forwards, not only in what they paid, but also in the lifestyle that they offered.
It's reached a point now where one of my son's friends' fathers basically works for an American IT company at home in his pants, almost every day.
I have another friend who works for BT Global Services in ‘internal comms’ (internal comms is basically internal marketing to your team), he has always worked from home for the past 25 years, and although he puts in hours, the flexibility that he has in his job, the ability to make a coffee, to stop, to put a washing on, to take the dog out, to answer the door for parcels, it's massive.
What people don't understand about the medical GP is what they don't understand about the dental GP: it's the fact that the job is extraordinarily intense all the time.
It's not dissimilar to teaching (my daughter's a second-year qualified science teacher); it's just that teaching does get the holidays, you don't have to be intense, and you can recover.
The intensity of a job doesn't necessarily apply to the amount of money that it earns, but when health is involved, and the significance of health is involved, and the conditions have got to a stage where the intensity is too much, we have a problem.
Every well-developed society would want some of the best people to be in medicine and at the top of medicine. They would want the same for teaching, and probably for defence, and probably for justice and the law (and, sadly, for politics).
These are areas where remuneration should attract the best people to a point to allow you to select from the best pool of candidates for a chosen position, but the GPs are leaving. This is a problem.
It's possible that GPs might earn £120,000 a year (or even more); if you're a partner in a practice or you own a practice, of course you'll probably earn more, but the average GP is not earning that, and the average GP is earning a lot less than the guy who's working in his pants from home.
I'm not a communist or a Marxist or somebody who believes in the collapse of the free market, but there's clearly a problem here that we can see.
When we turn round, and there are no doctors left.
When we turn around, and there are no NHS dentists left.
When we turn round, and there are no science teachers left.
It'll probably be too late then to try to redress the balance and fix the scales.
Bad enough as it is, but it doesn't look like it'll get better before it gets worse.
Blog Post Number - 4602