News Release

Staffing Crisis To Be Caused By Retiring Asian GPs: Statistical Evidence

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMJ

(Retrospective analysis of census data on general practitioners who qualified in South Asia: who will replace them as they retire?)

There has been a lot of anecdotal evidence about the potential workforce problems which may be caused by the retirement of South Asian general practitioners who came to the UK to practice in the 1960s and 70s. In this week's BMJ Professor Donald Taylor from Duke University in the US and Professor Aneez Esmail from Harvard Medical School report that one in six (4,192 of 25, 333) GPs currently practising in the NHS, qualified in a South Asian medical school, of whom two thirds are likely to have retired by 2007.

Because there is a large variation in the geographical distribution of these doctors (ranging from 0.9 per cent in Somerset to 55 per cent in Barking and Havering) Taylor and Esmail report that the impact of the retirement of South Asian doctors will be felt disproportionately. They also note that the areas in which these doctors are practising are concentrated in inner cities, with large list sizes and a large number of patients who generate deprivation payments and therefore they believe that the affected health authorities will have the greatest difficulty filling the vacancies.

The authors say that owing to changes in the regulations of medical licensure in the UK, doctors from South Asian medical schools can no longer be expected to fill GP partnership posts in large numbers, if at all and the promised increase in the number of medical students will come too late to have much impact on the potential recruitment crisis. Taylor and Esmail conclude that workforce planners should be acting now to mitigate the impact of South Asian retirements, with a particular emphasis on debating and making broad policy decisions related to the immigration of doctors.

Contact:

Dr Aneez Esmail, Head of School of Primary Care, University of Manchester aesmail@man.ac.uk

or

Professor Donald Taylor, Assistant Research Professor, Center for Health Policy, Law and Management, Duke University, Durham, USA dtaylor@hpolicy.duke.edu

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