AUSTRALIAN doctors will be offered $34,000 to move to the UK, as Britain’s GP shortage worsens.

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is set to offer cash incentives to Australian GPs in an attempt to fill an alarming shortage of family doctors across the country.

NHS England have declared they’ll offer £18,500 ($A34,000) to British GPs who have relocated and Australian-trained doctors who want to live and work in the UK.

Details of the recruitment plans were outlined at the Royal College of GPs’ annual conference in Glasgow on Thursday with a target of 2000 foreign doctors hoped to be in place by 2020-21.

The initiative mirrors the success of the London Ambulance Service recruiting over 500 paramedics from Australia and New Zealand in the past four years.

GP vacancy rates in the UK are the highest on record with more than 1000 doctors leaving the NHS in the last three years citing unmanageable workloads and increasing demands.

Two recruitment agencies have been tasked with finding suitable candidates and the British government has relaxed a cap on workers from outside the European Economic Area.

This could lead to the application procedure for Australian doctors reduced from a year to three months.

“It’s no secret the NHS needs to recruit more GPs, so it makes sense to head to Australia where doctors’ skills, training and high levels of care closely match those of their British counterparts,” Dominic Hardy, NHS England’s director of primary care delivery told the London Evening Standard.

media_camera The UK wants to employ 2000 foreign GPs by 2020-21. Picture: iStock

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

An August piece in the UK Telegraph highlighted that the waiting time for GP appointments in the UK was at an “all time high”.

The chairman of the Royal College of GPs Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard said patients were being forced to wait up to a month for appointments, leaving many to suffer or develop further health complications.

Professor Stokes-Lampard said overseas GPs who wanted to work in the UK had also struggled in the past to obtain a licence to work.

She said two years ago health officials promised to train 5000 more GPs by 2020 to counter the crisis but it seems the opposite has happened and the workforce has instead fallen by 1000.

Originally published as Huge incentive for Aussie doctors to move to UK