Workforce

The GP Worklife Survey: Providing an up to date picture of GPs’ feelings about their working lives

Assessing job satisfaction and job stressors amongst GPs in England since 1999

Clipboard with a form on GP desk
April 2024 -

Background

The National GP Worklife Survey (GPWLS) is a national survey of General Practitioners (GPs – family doctors) in England. The survey has been carried out eleven times since 1999 and provides the only long-term picture of how the working lives of GPs have changed over the years. The University of Manchester sent out surveys asking GPs about their job satisfaction and experiences in 1998, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021. The survey focuses upon GPs’ experiences of their work, asking questions about:

  • How happy they were with various aspects of their work, including the building they work in, how much they get paid, how varied their job is and how much they feel they are able to use their skills in their work.
  • The types of work pressure they feel, including the overall money available to them to fund the practice, the demands they get from patients and the demands that they get from the NHS more widely
  • Their overall experience of their work, including how complicated it is, how quickly they are expected to work and how difficult they find it.
  • What they are planning to do in the future, including whether they are planning to retire, leave their job for another reason or change the hours that they work.

In the past the survey findings have been used by the people responsible for agreeing how much GPs get paid, and by the people from the Department of health and Social Care who decide what sort of work they want GPs to do. The survey is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care, but the researchers doing the survey are independent. At the moment there is a crisis in general practice, with people finding it hard to get appointments and too many GPs leaving their jobs. The survey is one way that we can try to find out why these things are happening.

  • The aim of the GPWLS is to measure job satisfaction and stress for GPs and to track how these things are changing over time. We also find out about how GPs feel about current NHS changes.

    Objectives include:

    • To provide an up to date picture of GPs’ feelings about their working lives and the types of pressure that they experience
    • To explore their plans about how many hours they work and when they might retire
    • To compare with findings from previous surveys and look at what has changed over time
    • To find out what GPs think about current changes in the NHS

  • We will send out the survey to a group of GPs in England. We will ask them to fill in the survey. When we have collected all the answers to the survey we will check that the group of GPs who have answered more or less match what GPs are like in England. This means that we will check that we have asked enough men and women, as well as people from different ethnic groups and people who work in different ways. We will compare what people say this year with what GPs have said before, and we will use statistical methods to work out what kind of things affect what GPs say. For example, we might look at whether the GPs who work in a practice that they own say things which are different from GPs who are employed in someone else’s practice. We will share the results with the Department of health and Social Care, NHS England and with GPs themselves.