“It is pretty dire,” says Donna Mace, a GP and senior partner at Aberfoyle Medical Practice in Derry. “We’re struggling because we’ve lost GPs over the past couple of years.”The GP workforce crisis in Northern Ireland has been deepening for a long time. The number of whole time equivalent GPs in NI has fallen by 136 since 2015, according to the BMA. Looming retirements are unlikely to help: in England, 23% of GPs are over 55;2 in parts of Northern Ireland, this figure is as high as 33%, says Alan Stout, chair of the BMA’s Northern Ireland general practitioners committee. According to the DoH, between 2014 and 2022 there was a 9% decrease in the number of GP practices, because of closures or mergers—as in England, where the number of GP practices is also declining.3 The Royal College of General Practitioners Northern Ireland (RCGPNI) …

Source: The Guardian May 22, 2023 11:30 UTC