Although GPs are the most likely of all doctors to feel part of a supportive team, they face the greatest workload challenges, finds a General Medical Council (GMC) survey published last week.
The GMC’s survey, The State of Medical Education and Practice in the UK 2025 , revealed 44% of GPs are struggling with workload, compared with 29% of doctors overall. This is a slight improvement on last year (48%).
And the survey revealed that GPs were the most likely group of doctors to say they felt part of a supportive team.
Of the 1,076 GPs who responded to this year’s survey, 78% felt they had the support of their team compared to 73% among other doctors.
However, this sense of a supportive team has not been enough to offset high workload pressures, the GMC’s annual survey suggests.
Nearly half of GPs – 47% – said they felt unable to cope with their workload on a weekly basis, compared with 33% across all doctors.
And GPs were the least likely to be satisfied with their job – 48% compared to 59% of all doctors. This is a slight improvement on last year’s survey (42%), but it is still the lowest of all doctor groups.
The survey of 4,697 doctors, carried out last Autumn, found GPs were twice as likely to identify ‘pressure on workloads’ as the most significant barrier to providing good patient care – 32% compared to 16%.
Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chair of the RCGP, said that ‘years of poor workforce planning and underfunding’ were taking a toll.
‘These latest findings from the GMC are deeply concerning but will come as no surprise for GPs who have been struggling with high workloads and longstanding shortcomings in resourcing and training.
‘Over the last year, GPs and their teams have delivered a record number of appointments – over a million per day – with only a handful more fully qualified full-time GPs than we did at the end of 2019. This has placed enormous pressure on GPs who can’t keep doing more with less,’ said Prof Hawthorne.
Luisa Pettigrew, senior policy fellow at the Health Foundation, said the findings were ‘a stark warning about the state of the GP workforce and should act as a wake-up call for policymakers’.
She said: ‘Mounting pressures are driving GPs to reduce their hours or leave NHS general practice altogether, creating a vicious cycle that increases strain on remaining staff and makes recruitment harder.’
In the report, the GMC calls for additional support for GPs and steps to make general practice a more appealing career choice.
