Dr Suhail Hussain, 47, who works across Hertfordshire and Greater London, said he left the NHS because “I felt unable to give the service of care that I wanted to”.

1

From April 1 last year, the pay range for salaried GPs is £65,070 to £98,194, according to the NHS website.

But it didn’t stop Dr Hussain from making the decision to quit the NHS after 20 years to work in private practice.

He told iNews: “There was no continuity and I was not able to follow patients up, not able to spend time with them.

“It was like a conveyor belt, one patient after another, and it was not sustainable.”

When he qualified as a doctor and worked in a hospital in 2000, Dr Hussain said he would often be the person to admit a patient, then would see them several times over the following days, before likely also being the person to discharge them.

This meant he had “a full overview of their journey through the hospital”.

But this also required junior doctors to work for 24 hours or more on call, and so eventually things moved to a shift pattern.

Dr Hussain added: “Over the years, that continuity of care disappeared.

“We used to see our own patients. We’d know our patients. We weren’t scrolling through computer notes all the time, so the consultations were actually quicker”.

The medical professional says that he would not want his children to go into medicine “unless something changes” to address understaffing and heavy workloads.

Now, he said, there is an issue with understaffing, and the fact patients are living longer – often with various health conditions – makes it more difficult to give them good-quality care in a 10-minute slot.

Accessing information through digital records means that there is a “spillover”, with GPs often continuing their working day at home in the evening, he added.

And Dr Hussain says he is “100 per cent behind” junior doctors as they strike this week.

He added: “They are constrained by a system of bureaucracy and artificially constructed bottlenecks to remain in training grades for many years, waiting for an elusive consultant role to become available.

“We complain of a shortage of doctors, yet impose these arbitrary limits on a phalanx of highly qualified individuals preventing them from progressing to their final destination.

“Add to this the need to travel between hospital trusts – frequently at different ends of the country – uprooting all family ties and social connections.

“Pulling their children from school, disrupting their spouse’s career, and finding a new house, for example.”

He added that he knew people who had had to move from London to Newcastle for a consultant post, when all of their family were in the south-east.

It comes as a man who makes £20,000 a year from his side hustle quit his high-flying job.

Ioannis Kapoukis, 38, has a regular job as a web designer, but works as a DIY furniture assembler on the side.

Meanwhile, another woman quit her ‘fancy’ corporate job despite it’s high pay for one reason.