<p>General Practitioner Recruitment</p>

Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:10 pm on 13 September 2016.

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Photo of Carwyn Jones Carwyn Jones Labour 2:10, 13 September 2016

There are. I mean, I understand that two locum GPs have been recruited to replace the two salaried GPs in Kidwelly that handed in their notice, and that service has been resumed. What I notice in many younger GPs is that they’re not interested in buying into a practice. They want to be salaried; they want to have the flexibility. First of all, they haven’t got the money—raising the money to buy into a practice is tricky for them—and also, of course, they want to have the flexibility of being able to move around. The days when GPs went somewhere and stayed there for all their working lives—well, there are fewer and fewer, I suspect, who want to do that. The NHS has to adapt to that reality. It means, for example, that where health boards take over surgeries, in fact, the service is often enhanced as a result of it, and Prestatyn is a good example of that. Where there’s another practice that wishes to take over, that’s facilitated. There have to be a number of different models in the future to make sure that general practice is seen as attractive, rather than the one traditional model that will be attractive to some, but not all.