Burned-out NHS doctors in need of intensive care

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/15/burned-out-nhs-doctors-in-need-of-intensive-care

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How sad to see on your front page that so many senior NHS consultants feel disheartened (Burned-out doctors ready to quit NHS, 11 September). Now aged almost 69, I’ll be leaving later this year, and I can’t help reflecting that when I was appointed as a consultant 34 years ago it was pretty unusual for senior members of staff to retire before what was then the statutory retirement age of 65. Everybody simply loved the work and for the most part felt able to get on with the job without too much interference. The hospital was essentially run by the senior surgeon, the house governor and a single secretarial assistant. But with increasing pressures and multiple layers of bureaucracy, red tape and reorganisation, morale has sunk lower and lower. Teaching, research and clinical innovation, all of which require time to think and reflect and are so essential for all our futures, get pushed further and further down the agenda. Our younger colleagues now work under the constant pressure of oppressive clinical governance, over-adherence to protocol-dictated guidelines, and an ever increasing workload.

We know from independent global health surveys that the NHS, despite its many failings, remains the most effective health system in the world, yet it constantly fails to recognise that its most important asset, its professional and highly motivated workforce, needs to be supported to do its job properly. Quite apart from the constant external attacks from government and media, the internally generated and often pointless addition of yet more time-consuming non-clinical tasks has clearly taken its toll.Jeffrey TobiasProfessor of cancer medicine and consultant in clinical oncology, UCL Hospitals NHS Trust, London

• My 16-year-old grandson had good GCSE results a few weeks ago, and I asked him if he might change his A-level choices and apply to read medicine. He said he’d considered it briefly but his father talked him out of it. I was sorry, not only because I think he would be a good doctor, but because his grandfather and great-grandfather were doctors, so he ends a family tradition.

When I asked my son what he thought, he said he and all his colleagues would discourage a medical career because the pleasure and satisfaction that used to compensate for long and difficult hours have been removed by recent politician-directed privatisation. He was more concerned that a cohort of almost a dozen good and capable British-trained specialists in his field had recently emigrated to Australia. He would have been happy to have them as colleagues.Sandy GrahamSeillans, France