“BARRY Tempest” (January 31) asks, on the question of a GP shortage whether I was being “serious” with my previous comments of partly solving this ongoing problem.

Well, I was absolutely being serious.

It is difficult to understand why he would think otherwise?

After ploughing through his not really unexpected reply – I say unexpected, because although he accuses me of being in “error”

it is patently obvious that this correspondent is not up to speed with regard to the machinations of the General Medical Council (GMC).

Or for that matter, its ‘revalidation’ process.

If he were, he might be in better position to comprehend my remarks concerning a shortage of NHS General Practitioners.

Nor, for some reason, did Mr Tempest mention the disastrous deal a past Labour government did with GPs etc.

Without going into all the gory details here, for many doctors it was just like winning a lottery jackpot.

And yes, a simple tweak would indeed partly solve the now ongoing problem of a UK GP shortage.

Lastly, of course I know that some doctors work more than 48 hours a week and so on.

Yet another manifestation of the GMC’s revalidation process.

And why training up nursing staff to act as faux ‘doctors’ is a far cheaper alternative in the short term rather than employing more expensively trained real doctors.

What Mr Tempest fails to understand is the fact that there are currently hundreds of retired doctors out there who cannot work as locums or be able to help out in GP surgeries if a doctor is ill or on holiday for example, because they can’t even if they wanted to.

In the light of the above, I’ll leave Mr Tempest to figure out why that is.

But I won’t be holding my breath until he does.

ANDREW MARTIN

Kitchener Road, Weymouth

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