The NHS is England is to embark on a £100m international recruitment drive to attract foreign GPs.
The BBC reports that contracts worth £20,000 per doctor have been offered to recruitment agencies to help the service achieve its goal of 5,000 extra doctors by 2020. The agencies would be expected to cover the costs of relocation, recruitment and any extra training.
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As part of a 2015 Conservative election promise, GP services are to receive an extra £2.4bn by 2020 – a rise of 14 per cent once inflation is taken into account. NHS bosses have already said they will increase the number of training places for GPs – even though seven per cent of spots went unfilled last year.
The drive to increase the number of family doctors comes after the Daily Mail revealed that some 202 practices across England had closed or merged with another service in the last 12 months. Doctors are warning morale is at an all-time low and many GPs are abandoning the profession.
Despite claims the service is on the brink of collapse due to increasing workloads and a dwindling workforce, the government's promise to have GPs available seven days a week looks set to place even more pressure on staffing numbers.
Dr Krishna Kasaraneni of the British Medical Association predicted that even with the recruitment of doctors from abroad, the government would still fall "well short of its target of recruiting 5,000 new GPs by 2020".