Last year, I had the privilege of attending the two-day GP Partnership Programme delivered at Station Approach in Roche, Cornwall. As someone who’s been navigating the complexities of partnership for a few months now, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but I left feeling genuinely energised and better equipped to tackle one of the most daunting aspects of practice leadership, you guessed it, finances!
The Course Structure
The programme was expertly facilitated by two experienced GP partners and an admin facilitator who brought real-world practical insights to every session. The format struck a brilliant balance between short in-person presentations, pre-recorded content with supporting slides, and hands-on breakout sessions. This kept the energy high and gave us plenty of opportunities to discuss, question, and practice what we were learning. The 2 days were scheduled 2 weeks apart based on feedback from earlier sessions.
We covered everything from partnership agreements and GP-NHS contracts to employment law, communication strategies, and financial management. The course packed an impressive amount into two days without feeling overwhelming. The workshop-style sessions were particularly valuable, allowing us to work through difficult scenarios like handling conflict.
My Personal Learning Objectives
One of my highlights was connecting with GP colleagues from practices across Cornwall. There’s something uniquely reassuring about discovering that others are grappling with the same challenges you face. Whether it was sharing stories about difficult partnership meetings or swapping personal trivia during lunch, it was a break from clinical work.
How To Do Financial Health Analysis
While every topic covered was valuable, the session on financial health analysis stood out the most. We explored how to read and interpret practice profit and loss statements and balance sheets. These documents, before the course, seemed quite complex when I first encountered them.
Learning to identify key financial ratios and understand what they reveal about practice performance was genuinely eye-opening. It’s one thing to know your practice is “doing okay”; it’s quite another to confidently analyse liquidity ratios, profitability margins, and asset efficiency to understand why and where improvements might be needed.
As partners, we’re jointly liable for our practice’s financial health, yet many of us come to the partnership with minimal financial training. After the course, I felt empowered to contribute meaningfully to strategic discussions and make informed decisions about practice finance.
A Quality Improvement Project
Inspired by the course, I’ve been working on a quality improvement initiative to make financial analysis more accessible for new GPs, GP or Non-GP Partners or Managers. Using a lot of prompts, I’ve designed an online AI-powered application to help you learn which numbers matter and how to use financial ratios to assess your practice’s health. You can also use it as a visualisation tool for financial data presentation.
You can access the GP Financial Ratio Calculator here: https://v0-financial-ratio-calculator-gp.vercel.app/
How to Use the Financial Calculator
The app is designed to walk you through practising financial analysis step by step; however, you can skip to the trend page and start inputting your financial data. You would need to do the simpler calculations yourself.
1. Start with Your Balance Sheet: Gather your financial data in this order:
- Total assets (fixed + current assets)
- Total liabilities (fixed + current liabilities + maintenance reserve)
- Stock
- Current assets
- Current liabilities
- Total Equity (Total assets less current liabilities minus long-term liabilities)
2. Move to Your Profit and Loss Statement:
- Gross income
- EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Tax calculated as Net income before profit share + finance costs)
- Net profit
3. Analyse with AI:
Once you’ve input your multi-year data, take a screenshot of the anonymised year-on-year comparison table. You can then upload this to any AI platform of your choice (such as Claude, ChatGPT, or others) and ask for analysis. The questions from the analysis can help drive meaningful conversations during your practice strategy meetings, highlighting trends, concerns, and opportunities you might otherwise miss.
Final Thoughts
The Cornwall GP Partnership Programme is an excellent investment for anyone new to partnership or considering taking the leap. It demystifies the financial, legal, and interpersonal complexities of practice leadership while creating a supportive space to learn alongside peers.
My quality improvement project is simply an extension of this learning. It is a tool to help us all improve our financial acumen and confidence in our partnership roles. Please do try the calculator and share your feedback. If you run into any problems or have suggestions for improvement, drop me a query or leave a comment below.
Have you attended a partnership course recently? What was your biggest learning? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below.
Here’s to building stronger, more financially sustainable practices across the UK GP landscape.
Best wishes in your career. Read about our wellbeing survey based on the principle of financial analysis here.
The GP Health and Wellbeing Team
