A representative of GPs on Teesside has told how unemployed doctors were turning to charities for help as they could not pay their bills.

Dr Rachel McMahon, CEO and company secretary for Cleveland Local Medical Committee (LMC) which represents GPs, spoke as a council report referred to doctors looking for work while hard-up practices could not employ them, despite a backlog of patients often needing complex care.

The report is due to be considered by Stockton Council leaders next week.

Dr McMahon said: “There are definitely GPs who are struggling to find work. I know GPs who haven’t managed to do any GP work at all for several weeks in Teesside.

"There are GPs in Teesside who are probably working about half of the hours they could work for the NHS.

“We know there are GPs who are turning to charities for support because they can’t find any work and they can’t pay their bills.

"It’s a terrible shame when patients are waiting so long for their appointments, to have this fully trained workforce who are unable to help practices out.”

She put this down to “recurrent underfunding into general practice.”

She added: “Although all the political parties say they’ll put money into the NHS, it often goes into hospitals rather than into general practice.

“That’s one of the reasons practices are having really high financial pressure at the moment.

"We’ve got many practices in Teesside which would like to recruit because they want to offer a better service to their patients, but they simply can’t afford financially to do so.”

She said numbers of GPs had fallen while numbers of patients had risen nationally, leaving doctors with higher workloads, looking after 800 more patients than 10 years ago: “And the funding has not kept pace with that.

“Locally, we have GPs who want to work and practices who want to employ them. The finance is the only barrier.”

She said 21 GP practices had closed and the equivalent of 100 full-time GPs lost on Teesside in the last 10 years.

She told of an estimated 4,000 GPs nationally finishing five years of NHS training in August but finding themselves unemployed “because there’s nowhere for them to work”.

She said in other parts of the country practices had made GPs redundant, and GP partners had seen a 25% reduction in income over the last year, and were expecting the same this year: “That’s why they’re not replacing staff and that’s why they’re looking at making staff redundant.”

She told how practices hit by rising prices had laid off doctors in other parts of the country. Asked whether this could happen on Teesside, she said: “It’s definitely possible. We’ve not heard of any situations like that yet but it’s definitely something that some practices are thinking.”

She said on Teesside 75% of appointments were face-to-face in April this year, and practices delivered enough appointments for more than half of the population.

Despite this, patients still struggled to get a slot.

An Additional Role Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) was said to provide funding for 61 people across 18 roles in Stockton, according to last year’s data. Dr McMahon said this could be used to employ professionals like physiotherapists and mental health practitioners: “What it can’t be spent on is GPs, practice nurses, phlebotomists [who take blood samples] or receptionists.

“It can’t be spent on any of the traditional staff that patients will be used to seeing regularly. And that’s where a lot of the pressure comes.”

She said of a government recovery plan: “It looks at improving phone systems that put you in a queue, a stacking system rather than getting an engaged tone, and encouraging more online consultations, which I’m not sure is what patients want.

“You can have as many phone lines as you like. If you haven’t got reception staff to answer the phone it doesn’t help you and it doesn’t help patients.

“We’ve got a real problem with recruiting and retaining reception staff. The rates of pay are similar to the sort you can get for working in supermarkets or Amazon.

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“We’ve spent a lot of time training staff to be able to help patients properly, but it’s quite a stressful job and the resources are stretched. They choose to go and work in supermarkets for an easier life.

“That really adds to the problem. We’d love to be able to pay our staff more, but it’s completely unaffordable at the moment.

“We really need to see proper investment into core general practice. It has to be recurrent funding and a proper uplift.

“To stand still in terms of funding we need an uplift of around 10%. We’ve been offered 1.9%. That’s why GPs are going for a ballot on industrial action that starts next week.”