Pros and Cons
Pros
- More flexibility in the working conditions: hours, days, type of work.
- In UK, as a form to practice more hands on medicine and reduce the bureaucratic burden posed on permanent GPs.
Cons
- Pay and distance to work may vary significantly due to market conditions.
- The need to adjust to different computer systems, local protocols and referral pathways.
- Lack of control on the organization of the workplace.
- In UK difficulties accessing the NHS Pension scheme.
- Difficulties related to participating only on a snapshot of the care of patients with long term medical conditions.
- Reluctance of some patients to be treated by doctors they are not familiar with.
- Professional isolation
In July 2010, the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund (RMBF) published its report on sessional GPs entitled Support for Sessional GPs, highlighting the professional isolation of these general practitioners, and recommending the urgent need for professional support such a freelance GP chambers, and highlighting the benefits that meeting up regularly can bring, such as being part of a Self-Directed Learning Group (SDLG).
In March 2011, the RMBF convened a high level meeting in London with representatives from the British Medical Association, Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), Departments of Health from all four UK countries, and other GP representative organisations. As the outcome of that meeting, the RCGP agreed to take on the baton from the RMBF to reduce sessional GP isolation.
Read more about this topic: Sessional GP
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“Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar.”
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