A Ponteland GP is looking for ways to inspire the next generation of medical students to become community doctors - and fighting to address issues like staff burnout, workload and the entrenched health inequalities the North East faces.
Dr Lily Lamb, 40, is a GP at the Ponteland Medical Group, part of Northumbria Primary Care. She has also been awarded a prestigious National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Doctoral Fellowship to carry out a PhD investigating how more medical students can be attracted to work in general practice.
Hexham-raised Dr Lamb told ChronicleLive that, while she had been lucky to work with a stable team in Northumberland, this was not the case for many doctors and that she'd seen colleagues struggle with the well-reported upon problems of recruitment and retention in primary care: Not enough young doctors want to be GPs, and too many experienced hands are finding the workload and burnout too much and heading for retirement.
The NIHR funding is designed to back future leaders in medical research and to have practical outcomes for medics and patients. Dr Lamb said: "I qualified as a GP in 2015 and I have seen the problems we have with GP workforce. How we are struggling to recruit and struggling to retain GPs - and I wanted to do something positive about that."
Increasing the GP workforce continues to be a live political issue, with it widely recognised that boosting the GP workforce is vital to cope with rising demand and the ageing UK population.
She explained that part of her focus is to be on the value of positive role models and encouraging students to become GPs rather than follow other NHS careers. She added: "One of the main reasons medical students who choose to become GPs will have is that it's down to positive role models and educators in general practice. I want to understand how we can support more GPs to be those positive role models and to encourage more medical students to become GPs.
"I have seen and understand some of the challenges. They are things like the workload being overwhelming and that leaving no time for teaching, GPs suffering burnout and struggling to be positive about the profession. But the plan is to do the research to understand how we can work to improve these areas.
"And I think some of the solutions will be things like helping to support GP educators to look after themselves, helping them to recognise the signs of burnout and support them through it, and protecting time for teaching. These are things I feel we do quite well in Northumbria Primary Care, But unfortunately not all practices have this kind of support."
Dr Lamb - who has been supported by Newcastle University's School of Medicine - said that GPs in deprived areas were faced with particularly acute issues - both finding it harder to recruit and retain staff, and facing a potentially more complicated workload. The NHS refers to practices in these areas as "deep end" areas. Dr Lamb continued: "They are already likely to serve sicker patients who may have more complex conditions and co-morbidities. And in the North East we have some of the most deprived areas in the country, and those practices struggle the most.
"And then they are also places where they have less time for teaching and less time to show medical students what it can be like to work there. That's a problem I really want to carefully look at."
The Northumberland GP said she hoped to challenge perceptions that being a GP was not intellectually challenging. A 2017 survey conducted by the Royal College of GPs found that "only 3% of students associated general practice with being intellectually challenging".
Dr Lamb said she wanted medical students to be shown how working in primary care was "an amazing job". She added: "We do so much and we are kind of the cornerstone of the NHS. It's a wonderful job when you get the opportunity to work in a well-resourced environment but unfortunately that's not always the case.
"I want to celebrate the challenge that it is. You have to know something about everything. One moment you might be seeing a newborn baby and the next could be a 95-year-old with cancer. It can be hugely intellectually challenging."
However, Dr Lamb said she recognised how the tough position GPs face - with huge demand, people living longer and becoming sicker, challenged staffing and an often negative media environment, made encouraging new medics to take the plunge tough. And over the coming years that's what she hopes to work to solve.
She added: "I'm excited to be given this opportunity to do something about an issue that I feel so passionate about. To be given the headspace and training to do this is a privilege. I recognise I'm not going to be able to answer all the problems facing GPs in the PhD but I would like to see myself in the future as a leader on a topic I care about.
"I want to be part of the work both improving life for GPs but most of all for our patients, especially those in areas of the greatest need. I love the North East. I was born here, raised here, went to university here and I still live here. And I'm excited to be able to do something that I hope will benefit the North East."
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