Speaking at the conference on Thursday, Scotland’s cabinet secretary for sport and health Jeane Freeman said: ‘I understand how critical workforce supply and development is and I can assure you that I am taking a very close personal interest in ensuring that we meet our workforce commitments.’
She outlined recruitment measures with the aim of increasing the number of GPs working in Scotland by at least 800 over the next decade, and announced the launch of a new national recruitment website that will ‘seek to bring newly qualified GPs into Scotland from across the UK and overseas’.
The website, gpjobs.scot, comes as part of a £7.5m package to ‘recruit and retain’ GPs, and will ‘provide a one stop shop for all things GP related, making the whole business of linking GPs to available opportunities so much easier than in the past’.
GP recruitment drive
The Scottish health minister also highlighted educational schemes that have been implemented to help boost the GP workforce.
She said: ‘In the five years between 2015/16 and 2020/21 the Scottish government will have increased the number of medical places in scottish universities to a record 1,038 - a rise of 22%. We have announced 85 new undergraduate places focused on GPs, shared between the universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
'And yesterday I had the privilege of launching our new "scotgen" programme - a programme for graduate entry into four years medical training focused on general practice, focused on our remote and rural communities.’
