Does GP income meet expectations? The impact on job satisfaction

Today, we’re speaking to Dr Ben Walker, a post-doctoral associate based at the University of Calgary, who conducted this work while working at the University of Manchester.

Title of paper: Relationships of actual and expected levels of income with GP job satisfaction: repeated cross-sectional study

Available at: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2025.0683

Recruitment and retention of GPs remains an issue for general practice in England. This work examined the relationship between actual income and income expectations with job satisfaction and intentions to quit. Higher actual income was found to be associated with job satisfaction, but there was little evidence to show that it was associated with intentions to quit. A key and novel finding was that higher income expectations were associated with both lower job satisfaction and higher intentions to quit. The findings suggest that policies that help GPs build accurate income expectations, such as increased transparency for incomes for different GP job roles, may be a means of addressing job dissatisfaction caused by discrepancies between expected and actual income for GPs.

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

00:00:01.040 - 00:00:58.350

Hello and welcome to BJJP Interviews. I'm Nada Khan and I'm the Senior Research editor at the bjjp. Thanks for taking the time today to listen to this podcast.

In today's episode we're talking to Dr. Ben Walker.

Ben used to be based as a research fellow at the University of Manchester, but is now working as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Calgary in Canada.

We here to talk about the paper he's just published in the BJ GP that's titled Relationships of Actual and Expected Levels of Income with GP Job Satisfaction. A Repeated Cross Sectional Study.