A piece on the BBC. Rather than paying more overtime pay, why not ban doctors from working part-time? The proportion of doctors who are men would inevitably rise over time, solving many of the problems of the NHS.
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Thanks Frank. Women graduating from medical schools are more likely than the men to never practice medicine (many having bagged their life partners in medical school) and female doctors are more likley than male doctors to only work p/t at all ages including well outside child rearing years. Women simply don’t have the same work ethic as men (Dr Catherine Hakim’s Preference Theory) and this inevitably sends professions which become feminised down the pan.
The amount of female doctors working part time after having babies, is costing a fortune. Men are left to pick up the slack, so effectively women are costing the NHS twice as much. But will whine about the pay gap, knowing they are not doing the same amount of work
The really broken bit of the NHS is not the Hospitals (though they have many problems) but the service in the community, or more accurately the absence of service. Very few will have a “family doctor” most will struggle to get an appointment of any sort with in person consultations like gold dust. I notice the NHS last winter didn’t bother to tell people to go to their “GP” rather than A&E, perhaps at last being realistic. Anyone my age or older (mid 60s) will tell or hear stories of practices with lots of names of “Doctors”, most part time or “locums” meaning if they get to see one they’ll know no more than a glance at a computer record can tell them, if they bother.
At the heart of this collapse of what should be the key part of the NHS giving early diagnoses and coordinating patients care, specially those with more than one condition. Is the fact that a huge proportion are part time, for many years mainly women but now there are many P/T men as the profession has shifted (made all the more easy as Doctors tend to marry Doctors) to one organized to deliver “work/life balance” to its high earning workforce. In doing so it has increased the pressure on Hospitals because if you can’t get to see the GP the next obvious stop is A&E !
Of course GPs aren’t employees, so in fact they control their hours and can’t be made to work full time. Not easily. But returning to them the responsibility to provide out of hours cover and weekend cover, requiring un social hours may be a start.