A few years ago there were often 30 applications for each GP partner position. Now we struggle to muster any interest in partnerships, particularly in urban and deprived areas.

I have been a doctor for more than 10 years and a GP for the last six. After completing my training I took up a salaried GP post in a small practice in Lancashire. Like many of my fellow trainees, I was keen to have job security at a time when locum work and partnerships were hard to come by. When my husband's job meant a move to the West Country, I became a GP retainer in a large and ethnically diverse city practice. GP retainers (usually women with family or other commitments) work part-time, maintaining their skills until they can take on more substantive roles.

When I became a GP partner in 2010, there was already a shift away from partnerships towards salaried roles. GP partnerships are like a marriage: easy to enter into but hard to maintain harmoniously. A salaried GP, or a locum, can see their patients and deal with their associated clinical paperwork. However, a partner has additional responsibilities, such as staffing, performance management, premises and accounts. As more and more work is passed to GPs from secondary care, for many it is onerous to maintain clinical roles, let alone take on additional management duties.

Many partners are facing a significant pay squeeze, bringing their pay in line with salaried GPs but with a considerably larger workload. It is no wonder that partnership vacancies are hard to fill.

The majority of young doctors are now female and in many areas women GPs outnumber men. They are opting for salaried jobs, while male GPs are doing locum or out-of-hours work. In most areas of the country, locum work is still plentiful and lucrative. Locums (working independently or through agencies) can be very costly to partnerships, but often there is little choice if we cannot recruit "salarieds" or partners.

For many there is little incentive to continue in general practice. There are also pressures around revalidation (when GPs demonstrate at five-yearly intervals that they are up to date and fit to practise). Many GPs are retiring earlier, rather than deal with rising bureaucracy, stress and burnout. Some of our brightest doctors are going to work abroad. We may soon go back to "golden handshakes" to recruit GPs to high-demand areas. The government may even be compelled to recruit GPs from abroad as it did after the creation of the NHS.

But why train doctors only to offer them hostile working conditions so that they leave or go into private practice? Personalised care by a GP who knows their patients well will disappear if we're not careful. Smaller surgeries will no longer be viable and will become swallowed up by larger impersonal organisations with little continuity of care. There is a real feeling among GPs that we need to offer a cost-effective service to the NHS. As a result, incomes will diminish, but at the same time the government expects workload to continue to rise when practices cannot recruit or retain staff. This is unrealistic and unsafe and risks destroying general practice.