Peter Tooley considers the addition of women GPs to a practice

Women as patients 

Now which partner, do you think was running the cervical smear clinic, who was doing the cervical smears, doing the family planning clinic, looking after the ladies and doing as many deliveries as he could?  That was me.  Then they put this thing called a female partner, or female trainee in, and I had to look after men, and it was you know, this was tough!  So it was, I suspect a little bit of me was a little bit sort of reticent, reluctant, but the nice thing was that, of course, when they failed to do something, or they had difficulty doing something, they always came to me, ’cause I was the one that knew, so that was all right.  

So, no, those are changes and then, yes, I think what they’ve got now, and they haven’t got any bigger, not significantly bigger, the number of partners is the same – they’ve got one more woman partner, because they’ve got two women who share it, which is exactly what I would like to see now.  A lady partner can’t be a full-time partner and work part-time, half-time.  She’s not a full-time partner, so I think you, you should always employ women in your practice, but I think you should employ two for the price of one so that, you, ‘I employ you, Mrs Jones or Dr Jones and you Dr Something-Else, you’ll work together, you’ll do half a week, you do half a week, but when you’re away you do full-time, when you’re away, you do full time, and so on, and I think that would work very well, and the women would get exactly what they wanted from the point of view of children, and responsibilities, which I’m fully aware of, and it would be, it would work much better than the men doctors saying, ‘Oh, they don’t hardly turn up,’ because they’re only here for a little while, and it would stop all of that.