The European population is expanding and getting older, while there are constantly less General Practitioners (GPs) that can satisfy their needs and take good care of them. Indeed, GPs play a crucial role in intermediating between patients who are unwell and specialists, but there are not enough of them. While there are very few new doctors who decide to specialize in this field, the ones who are already active are aging together with the population, and are getting closer to retirement age.
Among the various underlying causes to this situation there are working conditions, wages, the difficulties of the job, long travel time, and the fact that shortages often take place in areas that are already poorer and less desirable. An EDJNet investigation coordinated by Voxeurop, dug deeper into the reasons behind this European-wide shortage of GPs. The investigation analyzed the situation in 11 European countries, also highlighting the challenges of working with fragmentary and hard-to-compare data.