‘My qualitative research uses a psychosocial approach to explore GPs experiences during changes in healthcare delivery prior to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The challenges of running everyday general practice under the neoliberal paradigm meant that GPs were retiring early, and that new GPs were hard to recruit.

Even before March 2020, the biopsychosocial model of medicine was contending with many complexities, including workforce shortages, an ageing population, increasing incidence of chronic comorbidity, and the development of clinical technologies, to name but a few. General practice is also challenged by the requirements of commissioning, bidding, and contracting in order to sustain income and viability.

What defines GPs primary tasks, roles, and systems, and how are GPs motivations and identities affected by this situation of clinical complexity and financial challenge? My research reveals three types of GP and an ecosystems model of the organisation in-the-mind, involving various social defences and valences for individual and group functioning, and this is what I will explore in this Lunchtime Talk.’

Recording of the talk