AT a time when there is a desperate need for new GPs, it is disappointing to learn that some lecturers in Scotland’s medical schools may be putting trainees off the career. According to the leaders of three GP organisations, some university staff and consultants belittle the profession by suggesting it is not a job for “proper doctors”.

Some have also apparently suggested the job is unchallenging and amounts to nothing more than treating a succession of coughs and colds. The implication is that if a medical student is really talented, he or she will go elsewhere.

Some of these comments will be just banter, but the danger is that they will make an already difficult situation worse. The 2004 pay deal for GPs famously offered them a big pay rise while allowing them to opt out of out-of-hours coverage, but in the years since, the problems for GPs have mounted. One practice which carried out an audit recently found that the paperwork they had to complete had increased by

250 per cent in eight years. In recent years, GPs surgeries have also had to handle many more elderly and frail patients with ongoing, complicated health problems.

Partly because of these issues, recruiting GPs has become increasingly difficult. Three years ago, 96 per cent of GP training positions were taken; last year it was 89 per cent; and now 20 per cent of training positions are unfilled. Some potential GPs will be put off by the solitary nature of the job and the pressure to get through a great number of patients every day, but the fact that the job is also being belittled by some lecturers cannot help and will contribute to the impression that being a GP will attract little of the prestige and respect that being a consultant does.

There are a number of ways to help turn the situation around. Improving the relationship between the different medical disciplines is certainly one way because the more consultants and academics know about general practice, the more they will respect the career and the less likely they will be to run it down to their students.

It would also help to give many more students direct experience of general practice. Under the current system, not all junior doctors routinely spend time in a GP’s surgery as part of their training, meaning many of the myths about it go unchallenged. There will naturally be some trainees who are unsuited to life as a GP, but others who experience it will find that, rather than being a dead end for trainees who are not “proper doctors”, it is actually the right job for them and the recruitment problem will ease.

However, this is only likely to happen if GPs are also given the help they need. GPs surgeries are already in the frontline of healthcare in Scotland, and their importance is only likely to increase as the focus of the NHS increasingly moves from care in hospital to care in the community. As a matter of urgency, GP surgeries need more resources, more support, more staff, including specialists in geriatrics, and more space and time for training and development. Better resourced GP surgeries with more time for their patients are likely to attract more trainees – and less likely to attract the sneers of doctors in other parts of the profession.