to share with you this gem - do you know who is being a burden on the NHS?

[NorthernLurker]

Women doctors (Daily Telegraph link) Of course! Yes those naughty women getting trained and then having babies. How very dare they. Sayeth two women MPs........who need to visit the most male chauvinist GPs they can find for their own safety in the future. Guess who won't be getting the speculum warmed?

I despair, I really do. Don't read the comments btw unless your blood pressure is dangerously low.

I hate it when women in the public eye put down the achievements or lifestyles of other women - personally i think that if us nurses can work part-time then why can't drs?

The NHS will just have to adjust to fit the modern way of life by having more job shares for drs!

More female drs is a good thing because many women want to be seen by a female dr rather than a man (i do anyway).

Medical students - like all other students - do not pay their 9k fees up front.

9k subsidises only a fraction of the actual costs of educating an undergraduate, esp in the hard sciences, so yes, it is still the state's concern.

My consultant runs the clinic I attend two mornings a month. After I have had a scan (which may indicate that I need surgery) I have to wait 3-4 months on average to see him. This is before I even get on a waiting list for surgery. When you google him, the first thing that comes up is his private practice.

The NHS has bigger problems than women GPs working 0.6 contracts for a few years.

Consultants doing private practice do so on top of their NHS work, not in NHS time. (Used to be the case 50 years ago, though!). If managers want to pay for more clinics etc then most Consultants would happily do them. Not for free, though.

I'm a part time female hospital doctor in training (not a GP). I'm also currently costing the NHS money by daring to be on maternity leave Not only that but it's my second DC! How very dare I? I am contracted to work 36 hours a week but as with many jobs that is a poor reflection of what I actually do work. When I go back to work in 6 months' time, I may apply to drop to 32 hours a week. I will continue to work weekends, nights and long days as my speciality is not a 9-5 type job. I'm 29 and have a minimum of another 35 years of working in the NHS in front of me.

I couldn't give a shiny shit what two Tory MPs think of me and my work/life balance, frankly. Their party has done infinitely more to damage the NHS in the last couple of years than anything or anyone else they try and pin the blame on.

I once stood at the operating table (scrub) with a consultant and his male reg whilst they bitched non stop about a female reg who they thought should give up any ideas of being a surgeon as 'she's got a couple of kids and will probably get pg again anyway' and just try for a post as a GP.

I was amazed at how misogynistic they were and was absolutely horrified by the whole conversation. Vile man.

I also think it's a management issue rather than a gender one.

It takes two to make a baby. If it's really costing the NHS that much for these women to have a child, let's charge fathers instead of tax payers to cover the costs incurred by their mothers taking maternity leave or working part-time to deal with childcare. After all, the mothers are already contributing by growing, birthing and caring for the child.

Or we could stipulate that no one working in the public services should have children - men as well as women otherwise we'd be flouting equality legislation.

Or we could accept that since people generally want to procreate but only women can gestate and yet both parents (and wider society) get the benefit of having children, society needs to find a way of incorporating that natural biological function into the working world.

Oh yes, we have. It's called maternity rights.

To be fair, I think that top heavy management and health tourism are much bigger issues.

If this is true, which it probably is, then it's a problem which should be addressed.

Couldn't they do something like make sure any student who has been trained by the NHS has to give a certain number of years service to the NHS or face paying back the cost of their training? That would solve the problem of the NHS training people who go abroad or who decide to do something else after qualification.

There would need to be exemptions for people who became ill, or who had other extenuating circumstances, but it would be perfectly fair.

TheSmallClanger is right. There are lots of doctors, male as well, who work part-time, because of other roles, consultancy or whatever. And what about the doctors that train medical students? By offering this flexibility and the availability of part-time working, the medical profession is actually prolonging the careers of all doctors.

And theres plenty of men in every field who get paid for full time work and don't put full time effort in, either due to sickness or simply not concentrating.

But if male students are simply not working hard enough to get into medicine, then what is the solution? To have lower standards for male medical students than female? I think not.

Clouds I don't think that's unreasonable in the majority of cases, but in reality it would only affect a tiny, tiny number of people. Most folk realise somewhere during the 5/6 years of med school that they aren't cut out for it.

The only people I can think of from my cohort who have dropped out of medicine altogether have had serious health issues.

You have to be Consultant level to do private work, which means by default you have to have already done approx 10 years minimum in the NHS.

I.do know of some SAHMs who are/were doctors but who is to say they won't return to it when their DC are older? We are all going to be in the workplace 40+ yearss so even 10 years "out" would be a minority of their career.

For the tiny number who do leave to do something else, I don't think forcing them to do a job they hate would really be a great solution.

By the way, I assume this would also apply to teaching? The drop out rate for NQTs is huge, and they often get bursaries for training on top of the Govt paying the cost of their Uni course. And what about all the majority tax payer funded degrees which are either totally non vocational or lead directly to careers in non public sector jobs? Are those graduates going to have to pay the balance of the costs of their courses, too?

Also, is there anything stopping Govt-funded NQTs going straight into a private school and never working in the state sector at all?

Clouds, you can't penalise people for going to work abroad if the jobs don't exist in this country. The only people I know who have dropped out of medicine after graduation either leave because they can't find jobs or because of health issues (I know 2 surgeons who have had to retrain because back problems mean that they can't operate). Once again it would be unfair to penalise either of these groups.

Does it really matter if doctors drop their hours to part-time? This usually still means around 40 hours a week and they usually continue to work until late in life. Surely training them is still a good investment of money.

Of,course it matters if its costing the NHS a lot of money that it doesn't have.

It wouldn't be penalising people for working abroad if there was no work, it shouldn't, in theory, be that difficult to keep a record of people applying for NHS jobs. And if they are applying for NHS jobs after they have qualified, then they wouldn't need to pay back their fees.

It could easily be applied to teachers too, although I don't think that's quite the same principle if they are going into private work. Children still need to be educated.

Vinegar you say it would only affect a tiny number of people, but if it would only affect a tiny number of people, then there can't be that much of a problem in the first place. But if there is, and the number of qualified doctors working part time or not at all is actually causing a problem, then it should be addressed somehow. The alternative is that we continue to knowingly waste money in the NHS, and to me that just isn't an option.

I don't understand how me working 36 instead of 48 hours for a few years is "costing the NHS lots of money".

I get paid for the hours I work.

The NHS plays a very minimal role in the funding of undergraduate medical education, there is a means tested bursary of around 4k per year for the final year of a 5 year course. The NHS also pays one year's worth of tuition fees. This is much less than the NHS bursaries for nursing, midwifery, physio etc. I assume your rules would be applied to those professionals, too?

You sound.... confused.

So it's only women doctors who work part-time? Er no. As has already been said plenty of consultants of both sexes work part-time for the NHS and run private practices separately.

Why is the criticism levelled solely at doctors? What about nurses and other healthcare professionals? What a load of tosh. This pissed me right off yesterday. I'm sick of politicians thinking they know what they are talking about when they know bugger all!

Clouds i agree with Vinegar drinker I really don't think this is a significant source of wastage in the NHS. I can count on one hand the number of people from my year in medical school who have left the profession. A few now work overseas, but this was after several years working in the UK.

Vinegar drinker - will be joining you soon. I'm a pesky part time worker too and off on maternity leave in 2 weeks time.

I'm not confused, I'm just pondering solutions to a problem that I read about in an article at about 7am this morning (pre coffee fix). I may well be forgetting stuff though!

Also, I thought the reason it cost money was because it was costing more money than it should was because it meant that one full time position needed two lots of training costs to cover it in these cases, rather than just one.

But how is me working PT for a few years "costing the NHS lots of money"?

Clouds I also agree with Vinegar who seems to know far more about it than you do.

Also, your comment "children still need to be educated" - presumably sick people who go private still need to be treated?

Vinegar yes, I don't think it's my consultant's fault per se, although I do wonder if private practice could be discouraged: after all, as you say, he can only work privately because of his NHS training, and this means that he isn't around quite a lot of the time. And only a couple of surgeons at every hospital - I would guess - will have his particular skill set. So patients just wait.

When you have long term kidney disease, waiting hurts!

I would absolutely love to see much bigger bursaries for medical students to encourage increased access to the profession. Those might come with a binding clause that recipients had to work exclusively for the NHS for some set time.

But the way this govt invests in education, I doubt it...

X posts. Training posts/numbers are allocated (competitively) based on workforce planning and the number of Consultants/GPs expected to be needed in 10 years. If someone goes PT, they don't create another training number to "compensate". In fact a lot of the "slack" is taken up by doctors in non training posts who are often overseas trained, and used purely for "service provision".

It costs £350,000 to train a Doctor in the UK to post foundation level and in excess of £500,000 to train a Doctor to consultant level - this excludes the cost to the individual for Uni costs and living expenses.

And working pt isn't costing lots of money. Be glad you have the option: I'm an academic and at a previous institution a female colleague wanting to cut down hours was told "either you're here or you're not" - !

Meanwhile of course all the male profs have SAH wives

Revolting well I'm an unapologetic lefty so would have no problem with your proposal, but the reality is if your Consultant's manager agreed for him/her to do more operating on NHS patients, chances are they would jump at the chance. Surgeons love operating and it's generally an ongoing fight for them to get more operating lists approved by the purse holders!

I don't know of any Consultants who work PT in order to do private work, though. They will be on a standard number of "PAs" (sessions) for the NHS and any private work done above and beyond that.

I have two female doctors in my family. Both have stopped working as doctors.

Nothing to do with having children and everything to do with the utterly shit conditions they used to have to work in. They can make more money for fewer hours elsewhere, and they got fed up of being treated like shit.

But maybe if they were men they wouldn't have?