DOCTORS’ leaders have urged the Government to take urgent action to tackle a growing shortage of GPs, with signs that the North-East is struggling to attract them.

A new British Medical Association report called Securing the Future GP Workforce comes to the conclusion that the GP workforce in the UK is now shrinking rather than growing and there is an unequal distribution of GPs across the country with areas of high deprivation such as the North-East having fewer GPs per head than the UK average.

With GPs wishing to take early retirement and a separate survey showing that more than a third of training posts for GPs in the North-East are unfilled, the BMA has called for urgent action.

An earlier survey, which showed that only 70.9 per cent of training posts for GPs had been filled in the North-East - compared to a 85.1 per cent across the whole of the UK – confirmed that the region has the worst record in the country in attracting new GPs .

The figures were contained in a report published by Health Education England earlier this summer.

Dr Richard Vautrey, deputy chair of the BMA’s GP committee, said: “We have reached a serious crisis point where not enough GPs are being recruited and too many are retiring early.

“Recent GP trainee recruitment figures showed hundreds of vacancies across the UK. A BMA survey in March suggested that six out of ten GP were considering early retirement, with a third actively planning for this decision.

“There is no longer any time to waste and the government needs to implement the findings of this report in full and begin a programme of sustained, long term investment in the GP workforce.”