As a semi-retired GP who happily does one or two locum surgeries most weeks in my own locality because, believe it or not, I actually enjoy doing this, I would like to make a few observations.

I am in my late-60s and was a fulltime partner in a practice for 34 years until nine years ago.

An incredible amount of locum and part-time work is available these days, I assume because the partners in practices are occupied with tasks other than dealing with their own patients, possibly needing to take more breaks, possibly on short or longer term sickness leave, possibly doing all sorts of paperwork to increase their "points for pennies".

When you consider the loss of the GPs' out of hours service (weekends, national holidays, nights), the sabbaticals, the protected days, the "recharge the batteries" holidays, routine holidays, maternity leave and paternity leave, it does seem to take a big chunk away from getting to know your patients and their families.

Despite all this, pay has gone up considerably for the average GP.

Mind you, with all the extra work GPs are doing to run the practice in the way they are directed from above, they earn the extra cash.

I must admit, I (and I believe the majority of the patients) preferred the way it used to be.

In my days, we rarely employed locums, we worked at weekends and were on call "out-of-hours", albeit more and more working with colleagues of other local practices to organise "on-call" rotas.

I'm sure we had our own minor illness but, rightly or wrongly, we rarely had time off to recover - maybe because we were not being constantly harassed by remarkable new and wonderful ideas to improve the service.

We were paid a lot less money than is earned today and maybe we were worth more but I don't recall being too distressed by it all. We were certainly very much part of the local community and could truly be called "family doctors".

Of course, I understand and approve of preventative medicine.

But surely we could make this more the responsibility of the general public, informing them of the facts and advising them of facilities available at their practices, rather than bribing the GP with financial incentives to organise clinics for virtually every treatable condition and paying them huge sums from the NHS purse if they cajole a high enough percentage of their patients to attend?

  • Dr D Gordon, Windlesham Road, Shoreham-by-Sea