A WORCESTERSHIRE GP says he wants to retire early because of the pressure overworked doctors are under with many colleagues already having jumped ship.

Dr Simon Parkinson, secretary of the Worcestershire Local Medical Committee, had hoped to retire at 65 but said he now aims to retire early, aged 56, because of the huge workload county GPs face.

He believes the Government must take urgent action to address these pressures with more support given to GPs.

Dr Parkinson said it had long been argued that 'general practice is the answer' to help people get care at home rather than hospital but that spending on hospitals had gone up and spending on general practice had gone down.

We reported earlier this month how A&E departments are under pressure with patients having to receive care on hospital trolleys at Worcestershire Royal Hospital in Worcester.

This led to frustrated ambulance bosses dispatching a medical incident officer (MIO), a senior consultant doctor usually called in to deal with large fires, care accidents and explosions.

But Dr Parkinson, a GP of 28 years based at St Stephen's surgery, said it was also GPs facing the strain.

He said: "They need to address the workload. The key issue is the workload. It's the workload, demand on the services which is causing people like me to want to get out and discouraging youngsters from coming in."

He said GPs were treating patients with increasingly complex needs and often with several different health complaints including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes and heart problems.

He said often a 10 minute consultation was not even time to see a patient with multi-factorial health problems at once.

Dr Parkinson, who represents the county's 493 GPs, said a recent survey by ICM on behalf of the British Medical Association broadly reflected the problems being felt by doctors in Worcestershire.

The National survey of GPs was based on 15,560 responses with the postal version sent out on January 5 with a deadline of February 20.

The BMA sent an electronic version of the questionnaire to 31,310 members on January 3.

GPs were asked to rank the top factors that they find most attractive about general practice. The most popular reasons provided were the variety of working as a generalist (80 per cent) and being able to develop relationships with patients over time and more than half (76 per cent) while having no weekend or night work unless they choose to (57 per cent).

When asked to rank the top factors that most negatively impact on their personal commitment to a career in general practice, the most frequently selected answers were workload (71 per cent); and inappropriate and unresourced transfer of work into general practice (54 per cent) and insufficient time with each patient (43 per cent).

Almost half (47 per cent) of GPs would recommend a career in general practice to an undergraduate or a doctor in training.

More than nine in ten GPs (93 per cent) said that their workload has negatively impacted on quality of care given to patients.

Dr Parkinson said: "Every surgery in Worcestershire is at our beyond capacity. Most of us are dealing with over 60 patients per day which probably is too many.

"I want to continue but the workload is too great. I'm whacked by a busy day, addressing a lot of complicated problems. I am both physically and emotionally whacked.

"A lot of the older GPs have already gone. There are too many patients and not enough doctors. The average practice looks after 1,800 to 2,000 patients per doctor. That's too many."