NHS: BMA Calls for More Part-Time Doctors

With work stresses and Brexit producing an NHS staffing crisis the doctors’ union the British Medical Association has advised that offering more part-time jobs in the health service could help bolster numbers.

Flexible work

“Part time work should be a reality throughout medical careers,” said the BMA in response to the Health Department’s consultation on providing more medical school places.

“Yet the evidence shows that despite many wanting to work part-time the vast majority of consultant posts are only advertised as full-time roles.”

That means a lot of qualified doctors who are able to work are ruled out by other commitments. Meanwhile a growing number of full-time doctors are having to leave the profession because of growing mental health problems caused by heavy workloads and long shifts.

“Flexible working includes not just part-time working, but parental leave, more flexibility around shift patterns, out of hours working and locum working. Addressing these issues would make a practical difference to work life balance,” the BMA said. The association believes that part-time work would help staff retention. “Adopting a more flexible approach may well encourage many doctors to delay retirement,” it said. “Encouraging part-time working throughout medical careers will reduce the stigma of and discrimination against this working pattern.”

Part-time Training

The NHS already offers “less than full-time” (LTFT) training but that is based on eligibility criteria including caring responsibilities, religious reasons and other professional developments like serving on a committee or competing in international sporting events.

The association warns that flexibility is undermined by tedious scheduling as “current arrangements for rostering shifts mean that LTFT trainees do not get advance notice of shifts and are not guaranteed the same shift patterns from week to week. They may therefore struggle to arrange shifts around fixed childcare and caring responsibilities.”

“While there are increased opportunities theoretically to train and work more flexibly the reality of work patterns indicates that we are still far from the work-life balance many families need,” said the BMA. “LTFT trainees for example incurred a financial loss with the move away from automatic pay progression in the new contract. Whilst this will be temporarily alleviated by transitional pay protection arrangements, the reality is that opting to train part-time will require proper planning and financial saving, and may influence the choice of speciality trainees opt for.”

Women

Women provide clear examples of how the medical system falls down in providing part-time and more flexible work. Recent research carried out by the Medical Women’s Federation has shown that those working less than full time feel they are often taken less seriously than their full-time colleagues.

“There is considerable evidence that a gender pay gap exists in medicine, particularly impacting women who work part-time and/or who take time off to have children,” said the BMA. “Looking at the whole of the medical profession, women earn an average of 30% less than men.”

An obvious part of that imbalance pattern is the shortage of women in senior posts, as women have outnumbered men along medical students for more than 20 years but the top of the profession is still enormously lop-sided in terms of gender.

 

by Stewart Vickers

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