13.10.2024

Group of 200 NHS ‘super GPs’ make over £200000 a year

The average GP earns an average salary of £90,000, but doctors can earn more by linking up surgeries, making record earnings by managing tens of thousands of patients.

Britain’s highest paid GP was paid at least £700,000 in a year, it has emerged. The family doctor earned more than £505,000 more than the chief executive of NHS England, according to a Freedom of Information request.

The average GP earns an average salary of £90,000, but doctors can earn more by linking up surgeries, making record earnings by managing tens of thousands of patients.

Figures revealed more than 200 ‘Super GPs’ in the NHS earned more than £200,000 a year in 2015/16. Four were on salaries between £400,000 and £450,000 while 11 were paid between £300,000 and £350,000 a year.

Family doctors have to provide details of their salaries to their Primary Care Trust every year so the NHS can calculate how much to pay into their pension pots. Many GPs earn just £56,000, while partners can earn up to double their basic pay as they are acting as small business owners.

Alex Wild, of the Taxpayer’s Alliance, told the Times it was ‘clear something is going badly wrong’ with GPs salaries. In 2011 the Mail revealed the top-earning GP in the country receives an annual salary of more than £750,000.

The astonishing pay packet is his or her pre-tax income even after all outgoings – including the salaries of all locums, nurses and receptionists they employ – have been taken into account.

The unidentified GP from Kent is believed to be reaping the benefits of a contract that allows doctors to run several surgeries that rake in NHS cash for providing extra treatment.
Figures revealed more than 200 ‘Super GPs’ in the NHS earned more than £200,000 a year in 2015/16 (file photo)

It enabled doctors to top up their pay by meeting targets for treating a range of conditions as well as allowing them to opt out of working evenings and weekends.

This could include minor surgery to remove cysts or ingrowing toenails, treatment for drug addicts or alcoholics or screening for cervical cancer.

A second doctor in Birmingham has been found to be earning an annual sum of £665,000, while another in Essex was paid £412,400.

Dr Vijayakar Abrol, a GP in Birmingham, said in 2011: ‘These Super GPs are more like businessmen. They employ slaves to run their practices – practice nurses and half a dozen locum doctors.

‘But if you look at all the indicators, they show that the care they are providing is not better, it is worse.

‘The smaller practices are better and patients see a familiar GP, not a locum.’

In the latest pay revelations, Alex Wild, of the Taxpayers Alliance, told the Times: ‘Few would begrudge paying doctors well, but it’s clear a minority are creating empires and raking in far more than could have been imagined by those who proposed the arrangements.

‘The chancellor allocated yet more money to the NHS at the budget last month, but when a GP can earn eight times as much as the average consultant you have to question whether greater emphasis should be placed on making the most of existing resources.’

The British Medical Association told the paper the figures do not represent the majority of GPs who have seen their income fall in recent years.

A spokesman said: ‘The tiny number of individuals listed as earning extremely high incomes are likely to be in an extremely small minority. They are likely not to be working on the front line treating patients, but managing large businesses instead.’

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