Reform general practice to stop poaching

Salisbury describes how new services use clinicians “poached” from general practice.1 These services are often responses to pressure—the GP in the emergency department, an extra pair of hands in a specialty clinic, and so on.

None of these GPs are taken illegally or without consent; all choose that new role or alternative post willingly because it offers them something that general practice currently fails to deliver. That “something” is variable—it could be fixed hours or a fixed workload, a new clinical challenge, possibly even respect.

So perhaps rather than ending poaching we should seek to reform general practice to obviate the desire to seek out strange new worlds of work by delivering a resourced primary care system.