What are the challenges of GP Supervision?
GP supervisors grow GPs. We have the challenge of ensuring that the new GP has all the characteristics that we value, and that they have the required standard of knowledge and skill required by the vocational training organisation, the regulators and the patients. We have challenges with ensuring patient comfort when the registrars fall short of the patient’s expectation, eg when the registrar is anxious, or needs support, or simply is not up to the problem, or makes a mistake. We have significant challenges in balancing the books if the registrar is slow to see patients, unpopular or unwilling to bill.
How has GPSA supported you?
GPSA provides really useful organised training modules. GPSA is a voice in the medical political marketplace that represents me as a supervisor, and ensures my issues are front and centre. After all, if we do not train doctors to be GPs, the whole community suffers and preventive and chronic care become fragmented and patchy. Training GPs needs supervisors, and the existence of supervisors is not guaranteed without this organisation calling out loud and long for the resources we need to keep supervising.
What would you say to others considering becoming a GP Supervisor?
Being a GP supervisor brings the extra dimension to GP work that allows GPs to continue to grow as they work through the decades. I am obliged to stay fresh, to not settle into comfortable and old medical ways. I am stimulated to change how I talk to colleagues and patients, as the registrars I supervise are now older in their life experience, and feel more and more collegiate. This is how you can work to bring more doctors into General Practice, and the way you can be part of the road they follow to practice good medicine