BMA SGPC guidance at a glance

The Scottish GP Committee has published three linked guidance documents. Each answers a different question, and they are designed to be used together. This page summarises the key points of each in a minute or two — the full documents are linked below each summary.

How they fit together: safe workload guidance sets the ceiling on what any GP should do in a day; profitability guidance protects the money that keeps the practice viable; sustainable working guidance reshapes the working week so the whole job — visible and invisible — fits inside it.

1. Safe workload guidance

The ceiling

Maximum 25 clinical contacts per GP per day — the BMA and European (UEMO) recommended safe limit. Complexity matters: fewer complex contacts can be less safe than more simple ones, so treat 25 as a ceiling, not a target.
Appointments should average 15 minutes, with no more than 3 hours of patient contact within a standard session.
When demand exceeds safe capacity, prioritise by clinical need and signpost to other appropriate services — unmet demand should not simply be absorbed.
Uncapped commitments (such as duty-doctor lists) should be structured and capped like any other work.
Practices are not obliged to provide additional or enhanced services — opting out or serving notice is a contractual right, with funding consequences to weigh.

Start here: count what each GP actually does in a day — every contact type — and compare it with 25.

Read the full guidance at bma.org.uk →

2. Maintaining practice profitability

The money

Agree a benchmark profit per partner session for the year, and test every business decision against it — whether or not it is currently being achieved.
Assess the business case for every service you provide or are offered, especially enhanced services: work that pays below your benchmark makes the practice less viable, not more.
Constrain or decline unfunded and under-funded work — the guidance exists precisely because uplifts have repeatedly failed to keep pace with costs, eroding partner income in real terms.
Stabilising partnership income is framed as a patient-care issue: unprofitable practices close, and closures harm patients.

Start here: set your benchmark profit per session at the next partners' meeting, then list every service that falls below it. Our enhanced services calculator prices the work in minutes of staff time.

Read the full guidance at bma.org.uk →

3. Sustainable working (June 2026)

The working week

Invisible work is still real work. Results, referrals, correspondence, supervision, leadership and running the business are core GP work — not extras done around the edges. Funding for general practice has fallen from ~11% of NHS spend in 2008 to ~6% in 2025, and much of the gap has been absorbed as unseen, uncontracted effort.
Build the whole job into working patterns. Practices should review the actual work partners do (the BMA GP Diary app helps), then build adequate time for non-patient-facing work into templates — using the 2026–29 workforce funding to do so without cutting patient access.
Move from sessions to hours. SGPC now considers sessions unhelpful as a unit of GP time; thinking in hours lets the full role be planned honestly and flexibly.
Change iteratively. Small tests of change (PDSA), reviewed and embedded, over a multi-year plan — then reflect the new pattern in the partnership agreement.
Protect continuity. Relational continuity is linked to lower mortality and fewer admissions; sustainable patterns should preserve it, not trade it away for raw activity.

Start here: the appendix's reflective prompts at a partnership meeting — which parts of our work are visible, and which rely on unrecognised effort?

Read the full guidance at bma.org.uk →

This summary is the Lothian LMC's distillation of BMA Scotland SGPC guidance and is not a substitute for the full documents. All three are supportive frameworks rather than prescriptive models — practices serve different populations and sustainable working will look different in different settings. The LMC office is happy to discuss how any of this applies to your practice.