Are millennial GPs shunning full time working?

Ian Cumming, chief executive of Health Education England, which manages the training of the NHS’s workforce, hit the headlines earlier this month.1 He told the NHS Confederation conference that millennial GPs—doctors born between the late 1980s and the early 2000s—were increasingly unwilling to work full time. Cumming’s comments were seized on by the national press, which was keen to tap into an easy stereotype of a generation willing to shirk its responsibilities.

Finger pointing newspaper headlines aside, Cumming had used data that seemed to back up his assertions: according to figures from NHS Digital, which provides clinicians and commissioners with data on the NHS, 90% of GPs worked full time in 2009 compared with 83% in 2016. However, when contacted by The BMJ, NHS Digital pointed out that the way workforce data are collected changed in 2015, so the figures could not be compared directly.

Between 2015 and 2016 the number of full time GPs fell slightly in England, from 40 697 to 40 490. The number working full time fell from 34 055 to 33 804, meaning that roughly the same proportion (83%) of the workforce worked full time in 2015 and 2016.