Without fail, government-provided medical leads to shortages of medical care and long wait times for what there is. One way to address the problem: turn skilled young doctors into overworked, underpaid serfs. Coming soon to hospitals near you: the US version. From Charlie Cooper at independent.co.uk:
Hospitals are pushing young medics to the brink of “burnout” by relying on them to work extra hours to plug long-term gaps in ward rotas, leading doctors have warned, after new research showed that the effects of NHS staff shortages are worsening.
Dr Mark Porter, chair of the British Medical Association (BMA), said the increasingly common practice of hospital departments requiring junior doctors to work overtime, or filling gaps with expensive agency staff, should be a “real concern to patients” – while the UK’s top emergency doctor cautioned that the NHS had now become used to working with a “skeleton staff” at A&E departments.
The warnings come in the light of a survey of 430 young doctors which suggests that rota gaps are now more commonplace than ever.
Many young doctors surveyed said their own willingness to work extra hours was affecting their work-life balance – with one medic admitting hospitals sometimes resorted to “emotional blackmail” when it comes to persuading staff to work overtime. Despite the burden on doctors, the survey found the vast majority were still happy to work in the NHS.
However, Dr Clifford Mann, chairman of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said the flow of British-trained doctors going abroad – as they are unprepared to work under conditions now common in the health service – needed to be stopped because it was wasting hundreds of millions of pounds.
To continue reading: NHS hospitals pushing young medics to brink of ‘burnout’
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