Meeting of the Parliament 01 September 2015
I congratulate Jim Hume and I thank him for bringing the issue to the chamber, because, as Alex Fergusson has said, a lack of GPs is a significant issue in Dumfries and Galloway, albeit that it is more significant in his constituency than in mine. It is significantly problematic to the extent that the BMA specifically referred to Dumfries and Galloway in its briefing.
The chief executive of NHS Dumfries and Galloway has told us that one of the reasons for the problem is that graduates are more interested in specialisms. Specialist medicine is more attractive than general practice for a host of reasons, and it is difficult to get people to go into general practice. However, shortage of professionals is not confined to general practice in Dumfries and Galloway. There is a shortage when it comes to recruiting teachers and social workers. Some of those shortages are around opportunities for the partners of professionals—there is certainly a shortage of professional jobs.
Other professions have had initiatives to grow more professionals. For example, Dumfries and Galloway Council paid for the training of social workers at the University of Glasgow, and in Dumfries and Galloway an initiative has recently been launched called grow your own teacher, in which people are being encouraged to come out of other education professions and train as teachers.
That is not as easy to do with GPs. We cannot really grow our own GPs, particularly in an area where there is no teaching hospital and no medical courses are on offer at the universities, so we attempt to recruit from other countries, for instance. However, that always makes me slightly anxious because we recruit from countries that need their own GPs and often we take them from countries that are worse off medically than we are.
I, too, am concerned about recently trained GPs going off abroad, perhaps into private practice. I wonder whether there are ways in which we can dissuade people who have been trained by the taxpayer in Scotland or the United Kingdom from taking the skills that they have recently acquired into private practice abroad.
This it is not Labour Party policy, so I hope that nobody will take it as that—the idea comes from me—but I wonder whether there is a possibility of training other suitably qualified professionals to bring them into medicine. My daughter has degrees in psychology and is training as a mental health nurse. I know a number of young people with degrees in history or even chemistry who trained to become lawyers after they graduated. I wonder whether there is a possibility of well-qualified scientists, for example, managing to be retrained into medicine, perhaps with an indication that they go into general practice. I am not suggesting that lots of scientists should leave science, because we know that there is also a shortage of scientists, but people with that sort of training might be able to be retrained. There is a loss of people from science, particularly women; perhaps there is a possibility there.
I ran the possibility of retraining other people past the chief executive of NHS Dumfries and Galloway, who was a bit concerned about it. He felt that people who were not adequately trained in medicine could be risk averse, just refer everybody on to consultants and create workload problems elsewhere. However, people who are trained to a high level in science have expertise in assessing the evidence and making evidence-based decisions, so I lay the idea on the table.
I will probably completely horrify the entire medical establishment in Scotland by making the suggestion, but I wonder whether we could examine whether other professionals might be able to be trained. It would be shorter, quicker and less expensive than training people from scratch. It might be one of a number of possible solutions.
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