Nearly one half of practices had to increase their locum use last year, according to a new report.
The report is based on Cogora’s annual survey, including the views of 1,158 GPs, practice managers, GP partners and other healthcare staff, in order to better understand the current state of the NHS.
Of the practice managers and GP partners included in the survey, just short of one-half (47%) indicated stated that their practice had increased their use of locum GPs over the past 12 months up to December 2015.
Locum GPs were hired for a median of five days in a typical month. Agency nurses were used slightly less frequently with a median of three days a month.
This comes after, last year, research from online locum website RLocums.com, showed that there was a 19.6% increase in the number of hours booked through their website (an average 110 locum hours in 2014/15, compared to 92 hours in 213/14).
The survey also showed that professional groups differed in the extent to which feeling unappreciated by NHS management impacted their morale.
This only had a moderate effect on practice managers morale, receiving an average rating of three on a scale of one to five where five indicated ‘very influential’. However, it was rated as being very influential by nurses, with an average rating of five.
Similarly, there was a difference in the extent to which workplace bullying affected the morale of different professional groups with GPs rating it as not at all influential (median rating of one, n=507) while a higher rating was given by nurses (median rating of three, n=273).
Read the full report here
