GPs can earn £250k a year
GPs can earn £250k a year
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Tuesday, 18, Apr 2006 12:02
GPs can earn up to £250,000 a year on the NHS, an independent group of accountants have claimed.
The Association of Independent Specialist Medical Accountants (AISMA) said that of the 600 GPs they looked after, ten earned more than that figure.
But speaking on the Today programme this morning, AISMA accountant Mike Gilbert added that those doctors who are earning such high salaries are in the minority and that there appeared to be a great disparity between the pay of GPs.
"If you are looking at the top end of the scale we certainly have evidence of GP clients of ours who earn in excess, before tax, of £200,000," he said.
"We probably have somewhere just short of ten GPs [earning £250,000], but you must remember that we look after about 600 so that is very low percentage."
The government has come in for criticism over its new GP contract, which came into effect in April 2004 and laid out new regulations for surgeries that wanted to stay open longer and provide specialist services not usually offered by GPs.
Many critics say that it gives NHS GPs the opportunity to earn too much - a concept that is particularly pertinent at a time when numerous hospitals are cutting jobs because of financial problems.
But health secretary Patricia Hewitt has insisted that the new contract is delivering more and better services for patients and maintained that the recent pay increases given to GPs were not a factor in the debts now faced by the NHS.
"I am very proud of the fact we are paying our GPs so much more and we are paying them more on the basis of what is actually the world's biggest health improvement programme," she told the Today programme.
"They are doing more for patients and particularly more to prevent and manage things like heart disease, and as a result they are earning more."
She rejected claims that many GPs now earned in excess of £250,000.
"I would be very surprised if there were a lot of GPs earning a quarter of a million pounds purely from the NHS," she added.
"There are GPs doing additional work for the Benefits Agency or for private insurance companies or dispensing GPs, who have additional sources of income.
"They are being paid more because instead of just being paid for having patients on their list, which is how the old system used to work, far more of their earnings and the practice earnings are now based on what they are actually doing."
She did, however, accept that the GP contract is costing the government "about £300 million more than either we or the British Medical Association (BMA) expected" and said that GPs were now doing "far more in response to the new contract".
"We underestimated the amount of work that GPs would do. They responded to this contract actually beyond our expectations and beyond the expectations of the BMA," she said.