Strategic Plan

The College of GPs has set its strategic direction for this year with three external domains:

• Workforce capacity and capability
• Improving primary healthcare
• Interaction between primary and secondary care.

On the one hand they may seem quite self-evident - we know for example that New Zealand needs more general practitioners (workforce capacity) and that there is an ongoing need to train and update skill levels (workforce capability) but lying just below the surface are a multitude of issues.

Recent work by the College has revealed that the GP workforce is aging and declining (57% of GPs are over the age of 45 and there was an 8% decline in numbers between 2000 and 2004). Anecdotally we hear that retirement is not the sole reason for the loss of numbers; that many highly skilled GPs are walking away from their practices and more alarmingly from medicine entirely due to the working environment.