There is a picture-postcard quality to Frinton-on-Sea, with its golden sands, Victorian-style beach huts and famous esplanade, where crowds of day-trippers spend the summer months laying out picnic blankets and licking ice creams. The genteel Essex town (population 5,500) has a station, six schools, seven churches, 27 restaurants and cafes and, to the delight of many residents of its comfortable retirement chalets, the UK’s 11th best golf club. Yet something has recently been missing — something very important. Because for most of the past year, Frinton has not had a single full-time GP. There are more than 8,000 men, women and children registered at the Caradoc Surgery, the only NHS facility in town. Yet when the Daily Mail visited last month, there were no qualified doctors on its staff.Figures reveal 10.2 per cent of full-time GP positions across UK are vacantOnly 61 per cent of vacancies can even be temporarily filled by locum staffEver-growing numbers of GPs are also choosing to take early retirementIn total 5,114 GPs have retired in England alone in the past three years
Indeed, having historically been served by four full-time GPs, _ residents complained that they were struggling to see a doctor at all. This leads us to the second factor driving the exodus of _ — money. That, in turn, means that _ who carry on working full-time, and contributing to their pension, will sometimes be taxed on that nest-egg twice: once when they pay money into the pension and again when they take it out. If that is the future, perhaps it will help the good folk of _.