A GROWING number of family doctors are retiring early because of stress — particularly in Scotland — leaving some patients waiting up to four weeks for an appointment. The usual retirement age for GPs is 65, but in Scotland an increasing number are opting to go early, forcing the average leaving age down to just 57, the lowest in the UK.

Figures due to be published shortly by the Scottish Executive are expected to reflect an alarming rise in early retirements and will show that stress is now the major cause.

David Love, joint chairman of the Scottish General Practitioners’ Committee, said that the number of doctors leaving the NHS early was in freefall. “GPs are retiring earlier now than they have ever done in the past. Much of that is down to the levels of stress they are forced to endure on a daily basis,” he said.

The shortage of GPs has led to patients in some practices in Scotland having to wait up to four weeks for a routine appointment.

In the Highlands and Islands the difficulties are most pronounced, because the remote locations and the small, scattered communities, make long hours and excessive workloads inevitable. Last week a family GP working on Lewis announced that she had decided to leave because she had not had a day off for 18 months.

Angela Lewis moved from Surrey two years ago to take over the single-practice covering the crofting townships of Uig and Bernera, but resigned after failing to find an associate to help her because the NHS salary on offer was too low and the hours too long.She said: “I love it here. It is a wonderful community and they deserve as good a medical service as anywhere else, but I just can’t go on. I have been working 24/7 for 18 months without relief.”

Scottish Executive figures show that the proportion of GPs aged 60 and over has fallen from 7.1 per cent to 3.3 per cent in the past decade. Meanwhile, a BMA study of Primary Care Trusts found there were 38 vacant GP posts in Scotland at the year’s start, 25 of which had been empty for more than three months.

Professor Woody Caan, a public health expert at Anglia Polytechnic University, has just completed a UK-wide assessment of doctors’ mental health. He gave a warning yesterday of a “major recruitment crisis” in the profession, saying: “The NHS needs more doctors. One way to boost numbers is to retain the doctors we already have.”

He found that long working hours and overwork resulted in the most common GP disorders being depression, alcoholism and anxiety. That was particularly true in rural areas, where isolation was an added factor, he said. Many doctors, however, were reluctant to seek help or even to admit that they had a problem.

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