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Friday, 19 April 2024

Wednesday, 29 June 2005 09:28

BNN: British Nursing News Online · www.bnn-online.co.uk

Doctor was paid £6500 for one week's out-of-hours cover

Scottish health board figures released under the Freedom of Information Act shows that family doctors are earning up to £180 an hour for treating patients in the evening, overnight and at weekends.

GPs can make up to £1,500 a night under contracts negotiated following the European Working Time Directive. The directive's cap on working hours allowed doctors to pass responsibility for care in the evenings, overnight and at weekends to health boards.

Doctors who are employed by boards on a contract are free to work as many hours as they wish, because they are not covered by the European laws.

Figures showed that a GP who works 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 too 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”.

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”.

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