FOI request reveals GPs' salaries: nice work if you can get it

FOI request reveals GPs' salaries: nice work if you can get it

NHS Tayside has released the salaries of every family doctor in Tayside. The five highest earners annually earn between £120,000 and £130,000 after expenses for a four-and-a-half day week of NHS work. Another 23 doctors earn over £100,000 a year.

Many GPs carry out private work for pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and other non-NHS work, but income from these sources was not included in these totals. The de-personalised information was eventually revealed under Freedom of Information legislation.
Questions were asked about GP salaries after claims that a doctor in the Western Isles was earning £300,000 a year. These claims proved to be false.

Dr Andrew Buist, a GP in Blairgowrie who is a member of the British Medical Association’s UK GP committee, said the average local doctor had a pre-tax salary of between £90,000 and £100,000. He admitted that GP salaries had risen significantly as a result of the new GP contract with the NHS, which led to all GPs in Tayside giving up their round-the-clock responsibility for patients. Dr Buist said he believed there would be “difficulty” finding out what individual doctors were earning, and took the view that Freedom of Information legislation would not give access to “that level of information”.

Tayside’s top-earning docs pull in £130,000 (Dundee Evening Telegraph & Post, 18 May 2006)