Wendy Baillie
speaker
482 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Aug
Wendy Baillie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
We actually found that 67% of doctors currently hold multiple roles. So not just your traditional role in general practice, but additional roles over and above that. So it is a bit of a change for medical careers.
We find that doctors are increasingly combining that NHS work with sort of private practice, consultancy, teaching, leadership roles, all of these kind of areas where their skills that they have already can be put to good use. So I think for GPs, in addition to that GMS contract, they often carry out GP appraisal roles, clinical leads. They can link in with early career GPs, mentoring, lecturing staff.
No, that is a factor for a lot of them. And, you know, quite a number of doctors say that they do it for increasing income, probably about 63% of it from the study that we've done. But actually professional growth
was the biggest driver we think GPs sometimes feel like they're stagnating doing your general practice stuff and they want to go and do more they want to stretch themselves more and actually you know that old adage a change is as good as a rest and our GPs find that that's really important so the biggest actual driver is just for some professional growth and professional diversification.
They don't necessarily have to stick to medicine and medical areas. The skills that GPs build up when they interact with patients and other professionals in their general practice job are so valuable and so transferable to all sorts of other different professions and different jobs. So whilst primarily these other roles tend to be in the medical profession,
They can quite easily be in other sectors altogether. And that gives our GPs the headspace that they need so that they can avoid some part of the burnout that we know that they're facing right now. So what are some of the different combinations of roles you're seeing GPs in particular taking on?
Alongside the NHS work, lots of our GPs are doing some private GP work, either through locum roles or consultancy roles, or they can be increasingly employed by a private GP firm. That's definitely a growing sector for obvious reasons, I guess. You can also do general practice work combined with teaching. So your GMS sessions, your normal sessions in the practice with teaching roles.
such as GP appraisal roles, which our GPs actually genuinely seem to love, which is nice. And I think as well, it depends where you are in the country. Some of the rural GP practices that we see dotted around the UK will also hold, for example, the emergency medicine out of hours contracts. We see that increasingly. That's good for income and flexibility. And also some of them are on call for the likes of police force forensics
Absolutely. We, as part of the research, there was a satisfaction score that came out and out of five, generally our GPs are 4.19 satisfied. So that's really high in what they're doing. There's lots of positives that they're finding out of it.
They've got increasing autonomy with it and that's really helpful for them when that's a particular worry with the new NHS contract that's coming in. It gives them a little bit more freedom as well to shape their career around their life. And that's been a little bit harder, hasn't it, in recent decades for general practice to be able to kind of fit that into your family life. And so it gives them a little bit more power there and also confidence.
just that workload you and I I think both can appreciate the admin workload that our GPs have currently and this helps GPs to manage it and gives them a little bit of a different type of work altogether so there's lots and lots of positives and lots of them actually are connected to good mental well-being which I love. But there must be some challenges with juggling more than one role what are some of the difficulties that doctors with portfolio careers face?
Gosh, yes, people were honest with us with the research that we did and, you know, really told us about the challenges. And primarily, a lot of the time they do it so that they can manage their time better. But actually, time management pressures are still there all the same. They're just maybe slightly different, but they're still there. Also, remember, when you're doing more than one role,
Keeping track of what you're doing, keeping track of where you're doing it, keeping track of what you're earning from what and what your pension's doing, for example, that can be quite complicated. When you've got one role, it's far more straightforward to keep track of all that. When you've got more than one, even maybe more than two roles,
it's increasingly complex for each additional role that you're doing. You know financial complexities with it can be particularly tricky especially actually if the portfolio careers that our GPs have stick with medicine because quite often they'll have NHS pension access with every role and it can be a different type of access and you then have a pension that's
Some of it's in the practitioner scheme, the GP scheme, and some of it's in the officer scheme, which is the hospital doctor scheme. And that can make things much harder to keep track of, much harder to plan. And so that's difficult. But also remember when we talked about just a minute ago about GPs historically doing 10 sessions and now it's more like seven or eight and maybe they're dropping another two sessions to do something else with their time. That can clash.
We all know that things sometimes at work take longer than you expect them to take. And sometimes it means that you're maybe taking a little bit of work home. And if you're taking a little bit of work home from every part of your job, that can really compete with the time that you've got and the commitments that you have to make elsewhere. So difficult to juggle time management. And the research also highlighted some unexpected financial challenges, didn't it?
So there's some practical challenges, Emma, that flag up when our GPs have talked to us about the difficulties or the challenges with these portfolio careers. And actually more than a third of them that have these multiple roles receive an unexpected tax bill because we don't always get taxed right.
But it's quite easy to forget that HMRC make everybody individually, personally responsible for their own tax bill and paying their own tax. And so if you've got as a GP partner, maybe a self-employed income and net profit, that feels quite easy to keep on top of with your accountant. But if you've then on top of that got an employed role,
You tend to rely on payroll, HR to work out things like tax contributions and to get it right and they don't always get it right. And so that can have a knock on implication on tax bills and suddenly being faced with a bill that you should have paid over the last couple of years and haven't.
I think as well, just what we were talking about earlier, when you've got different income coming in from different places, it can actually be quite difficult to know what am I earning in total? Remember, again, GP partners tend to take drawings from the practice every month and the net profit is something different that the accountant calculates at the end of the year and then if there's more income to take out, then they can.
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