What a Senior Partner Told Me, When I Asked About Partnership
I was locuming at the practice, in between patients, during a tea break, when I asked him straight out. Where’s this place at with partnership? Not a loaded question, just curiosity. He didn’t give me a straight yes or no. He gave me something better.
Population, not the vacancy
His first answer had nothing to do with whether a partner spot was open. It was about whether the practice actually knew its patients. If your list size holds steady, he said, you get good at predicting what you’ll need, more capacity in winter, the right mix of advanced nurse practitioners, paramedics, first-contact physios alongside the GPs. You know when a locum is a quick gap-fill and when you need someone covering six months of maternity leave. This isn’t partnership planning on paper. It’s the groundwork that decides whether a partnership offer, when it comes, is coming from a stable practice or a desperate one.
I hadn’t thought about it that way before. I’d been thinking about partnership as a personal decision. He was describing it as something the practice has to earn the right to offer, by knowing its own population well enough to plan for it.
Don’t take the offer too fast
He was clear that some practices go straight to salaried-with-a-view-to-partnership, and some don’t offer that route at all. He thought the ones that do tend to keep people longer, and he told me to ask, directly, how long it usually takes their salaried GPs to make partner. Not because the answer is ever the same for everyone. It isn’t. But because the answer tells you something about how the practice thinks about the pathway, whether it’s a real plan or a vague gesture.
What he came back to more than once was the relationship, not the contract. The salaried/locum years, he said, are when you find out how people actually behave. How they handle a bad day, a difficult conversation, a decision that doesn’t go their way. You’re not just building your clinical CV in that time. You’re finding out whether these are people you want to be in business with for the next fifteen years. His view was blunt: if a practice offers you partnership straight away, before either of you has had the chance to see that, treat it carefully. Ask the hard questions, especially if you’re newly qualified. Are you starting on parity? Are you buying into a building with a partner who might retire early, and could you end up needing to buy out their share sooner than you’d planned? See BMJ’s guide to partnership here.
Becoming a Portfolio GP
The last part of what he said stuck with me the most. He didn’t talk about portfolio work, teaching, a dermatology clinic, or a frailty service as something you add once you’ve proven yourself as a partner. He talked about it as what keeps the job sustainable in the long term. The GPs who last, in his experience, are the ones who found a second thing to be good at alongside the core contract work, something that kept the interest alive when the day-to-day got heavy.
Practically, he pointed out, that extra income can fund the extra hands you need to cover your regular sessions. It’s part of how a practice/partnership, and a GP, stays standing. Partners look out for this type of contribution to the GP business while also prioritising a great working relationship. Read our article on how to build meaningful relationships at work here.
What I took from it
I asked him a casual question on a break, and got fifteen years of accumulated judgement back, delivered without any of it sounding rehearsed. It’s the shape of how one experienced partner actually thinks about the decision: know your population before you chase the role, use the salaried/locum years to test the relationship, and don’t wait until you’re a partner to build the thing that keeps you wanting to be one.
We hope this inspires you to find your feet in this challenging GP profession.
