Health

Growing number of GPs cut shifts to avoid huge pension tax


A growing number of family doctors are reducing the hours they work to avoid a huge and unexpected pension tax bill.

The decision increasingly means already-overstretched surgeries have fewer appointments to offer patients.

One GP who last year dropped two of her eight sessions a week now intends to drop two more, halving her original workload. “Losing two sessions a week will have a significant impact on waiting times for patients booking appointments and also mean delays in dealing with administrative tasks such as referrals, letters and results”, she said.

“The other doctors in the practice are already working over their capacity and are simply not able to take on the additional workload caused by the loss of two sessions.”

Another GP, who is facing an £18,000 tax bill relating to his pension, has decided to stop doing extra work as an out-of-hours GP at weekends to avoid being hit with similar bills in the future.

And a third GP intends to drop four of his 10 shifts – two of which are in an A&E unit – because he has ended up paying more in tax than he earns from his work in hospital. “As a 32-year-old in the prime of my career wanting to continue to provide patient care I find this somewhat ridiculous to have to pay to work,” he said. “It’s a sad place whereby hard-working doctors are penalised for working to help the public.”

Their testimonies are included in a dossier of evidence collected by Everydoctor, which campaigns to improve medics’ working lives, about the growing impact of the pensions dispute on NHS care.

Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard, the chair of the Royal College of GPs, confirmed that large numbers of family doctors are cutting their hours.

“At a time when we are facing intense workforce pressures – and our patients are waiting longer for an appointment as a result – we need to be doing everything we can to keep hard-working, experienced GPs in the profession, not penalising them financially to do so,” she said.

Disclosure of the trend among GPs comes days after Boris Johnson pledged last Thursday to bring forward “policy proposals for drastically reducing [NHS] waiting times and for GP appointments” . The prime minister vowed to “fix” the pensions problem during a Tory leadership hustings earlier this month.

Dr Julia Patterson, founder of Everydoctor, said: “The pension crisis is forcing GPs to work fewer sessions per week. This is extremely alarming; patients need to be able to access healthcare in a timely fashion.

“We all know the strain that primary care is under already. People up and down the country struggle to book appointments with their GPs daily because there are too few doctors. Jeremy Hunt pledged in 2015 that there would be 5000 new GPs by 2020 but it hasn’t happened.”

Dr Irfan Malik, a GP in Nottingham, has reduced his hours by a quarter due to the pensions problem. “Some colleagues – even people in their 40s – had been stung with tax bills running into five figures. I’ve seen other doctors basically having to pay to do extra work and I don’t want to take that risk”, he told the British Medical Association’s (BMA) The Doctor magazine last month.

Fast-growing numbers of hospital consultants are reducing their hours after receiving bills for up to £80,000 as a result of government changes to NHS pension rules in 2016. Some have had to remortgage their houses to find the money, while some have even been pursued by bailiffs.

That is forcing hospitals to cancel thousands of sessions of surgery, usually because no anaesthetist is available, and is also exacerbating the gaps in medical rotas caused by the NHS-wide shortage of doctors, including in A&E units. Cancer scans are also going unread for weeks because so many radiologists have stopped doing extra work, the Guardian revealed last week.

NHS England chiefs are so worried by the pensions dispute that they have asked hospitals to provide evidence about how it is affecting services.

Trusts responded by detailing the number of “programmed activities” – shifts by consultants – they had lost as a result of the pensions problem during June and also how many fewer they would have during July, August and September.

Last week Matt Hancock, the health and social care secretary, llaunched a public consultation on the government’s proposal to solve the problem. It would allow doctors to pay only half the usual amount of pensions contributions for up to 10 years in order to reduce the rapid growth in their pension pot that triggers the big bills.

However, the two doctors unions – the BMA and Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association – and NHS Providers, which represents trusts, have dismissed the plan.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We are determined to fix this issue to make it easier for our hardworking senior doctors to balance their workload and pension pot.”



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