FAMILY doctors were compared to professional footballers yesterday after it was revealed that they could earn up to £6,500 a week.
GPs earn as much as £180 an hour for treating patients in the evening, overnight and at weekends. The rise in earnings has been made possible after the introduction of contracts allowing them to opt out of unsociable working hours.
Figures obtained by BBC Scotland under the Freedom of Information Act showed that a GP in Dumfries and Galloway made £6,500 for a week’s work out of hours over Christmas. In a typical week, a GP in Argyll and Clyde earned nearly £2,000.
Andrew Walker, a health economist at Glasgow University, said: “GPs are starting to look like the footballers of the health service. We hear about footballers earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a week. The GPs are not quite at that level but certainly to ordinary people the sums will sound very high.
“I think what people do place at a very high premium is the access to GP out of hours. This might be the cost of it, the unavoidable cost of providing in the 21st century a medical service out of hours, and we might have to swallow this.”
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GPs say that they have been underpaid for far too long and that the new rates are comparable with out-of-hours work in other professions.
The British Medical Association said: “Some of these headline figures sound high, but it is not unusual to be talking about ten-hour shifts for days on end. You try calling out a plumber or an electrician in Christmas week and see what they charge.”
A change in contracts from January 1 enabled GPs to opt out of providing out-of-hours care, handing the responsibility back to primary care trusts. Many had said that they were overwhelmed by the burden of being on call round the clock, which was a big factor in dissuading young medical graduates from becoming GPs.
The payments for out-of-hours work are particularly high in rural areas, where GPs are in short supply. NHS Highland, which covers the 10,000 square miles of the Scottish Highlands, has set aside £5.7 million a year for out-of-hours provision. Its rates range from £50 to £75 an hour. Garry Coutts, the chairman of NHS Highland, insisted: “We have to spend what it takes”.