Today, we’re speaking to Dr Laura Jefferson, Senior Research Fellow based at the University of Manchester. We’re here to discuss her paper recently published here in the BJGP titled, ‘Understanding persistent GP turnover using work and personal characteristics: a retrospective observational study’. Title of paper: Understanding persistent GP turnover using work and personal characteristics: a retrospective observational study DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2025.0260 GP turnover rates from national administrative datasets have previously been used to explore practice-level factors associated with turnover and its relationship to patient. outcomes. The individual and work characteristics associated with turnover is less well understood, with much research focusing on intentions to leave or smaller samples of GPs leaving practice. This study sought to fill this research gap, through analysis of a large dataset of GPs working experiences linked to turnover, understanding potential predictors that may offer solutions to the workforce crisis being faced in general practice. We find that GPs’ sense of autonomy, belonging and competence are significantly lower in practices with problems with persistent turnover and demonstrate how satisfaction with work characteristics such as working hours and experiences of strained relationships differs in practices with persistent turnover. Transcript This transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions. Speaker A 00:00:00.880 - 00:00:53.050 Hello and welcome to BJGP Interviews. My name is Nada Khan and I'm one of the Associate editors of the bjgp. Thanks for joining us here to listen to this podcast today. In today's episode, we're speaking to Dr. Laura Jefferson, who is a senior research fellow based at the University of Manchester. We're here to discuss her paper, recently published here in the journal, titled Understanding Persistent GP Turnover Using Work and Personal A Retrospective Observational Study. So, hi, Laura, it's really nice to see you again and to talk about this research and I suppose I really just wanted to frame our discussion here today by saying that there's been a lot of talk recently about the retention crisis in UK general practice, but I wonder, could you just talk us through how big is the scale of the problem that we're dealing with here? Speaker B 00:00:53.370 - 00:02:12.110 Yeah, thank you. Yeah, well, thank you for inviting me to talk to you today as well. I think it's interesting, we hear a lot of discussion in the media and in our research evidence as well, recently about an increase in GP turnover. In the past sort of decade, there's been a gradual increase, so that's in terms of GPs leaving medicine, but also moving across practices. And it's good to see a kind of change in policy focus from historically, a lot of policies focused on recruitment of GPS. So, you know, we've had like, pledges to have 6,000 GPS that have not been met and it's often kind of criticized as filling a leaky bucket. So if we try and obviously pay a lot. So I think it's approximately half a million pounds to train a gp, but actually to replace the GP is really expensive as well. So it's about £300,000 to replace the GP. And so, yeah, so there's a positive focus to thinking about retention, but actually it's about how can we do that effectively and understanding that the sort of one size fits all approach doesn't necessarily work and that there's different gps with different needs. Speaker A 00:02:12.590 - 00:02:36.830 And this was a study where you were looking at the association between high practice turnover of GPs and GP job...