Source: Royal NZ College of General Practitioners
The well-documented workforce shortages have meant that specialist GPs and rural hospital doctors are having to take on more work and work longer hours.
To understand how widespread this issue is, and how it is truly impacting our membership of over 5,800 specialists, The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners developed the ‘Your Work Counts’ project. The aim is to identify how much time is being spent on key tasks and addressing the unrecognised and often non-remunerated work that GPs put in to caring for people throughout the course of their lives.
The data collected will help the College to develop evidence-based guidelines around:
1. What a fair and reasonable 40-hour week looks like
2. Safe and sustainable patient loads
3. Ratios for how many GPs per 100,000 patients each region, and the country, needs
College Medical Director and Tauranga GP Dr Luke Bradford says, “Until now, most discussions about the way we work have focused only on the patient-facing aspect. The College wanted to highlight the amount work that is actually required to look after a primary care patient load as a specialist GP or rural hospital doctor.
“The results, below, clearly show the demands being placed on the workforce and that there needs to be a change in thinking around GP workloads and the funding model.”
The results
Over 400 members completed the project’s first diary study. At the end of every day for 14 days, including week
