@Dissimilitude FFS they OP is about the long waiting time for surgery.
And then you say "but no one is talking about the specialities heavily affected by covid"
Exactly where do you think operations happen?
Exactly who do you think administers anaesthesia?
I'll tell you.
Operations happen in the operating theatres - yup those places that in many many hospitals were turned into makeshift ITUs. With theatre, anaesthetic and recovery nursing staff rapidly unskilled to become ITU nurses.
Anaesthetists are some of the most agile clinicians in the hospital - we can do anaesthetics, but loads of us have medical management roles, and we do lots of ITU during our training. I do not know a single anaesthetic colleague anywhere in the UK that was not on a different working pattern due to covid.
My own experience was that we lost our registrars and half our consultant colleagues to adult ITU.
Those of us left in paediatric anaesthesia had to become resident - that meant my senior colleagues in their 60s went back to being in the hospital overnight. This also meant that we were anaesthetising some really high risk children single handed - normally there would be a consultant and a registrar. Quite frankly it was brutal.
In the wider children's hospital - the paediatric ICU became an adult ICU. Paediatric ICU condensed into a much smaller footprint. Nursing staff were deployed to assist in adult ICU so some of the specialist nursing roles were left uncovered meaning more work for the medical team.
The children's hospital adult ICU has now closed but we are in a regrouping phase. The waiting list is enormous. I'm sure some of the people who read this post will have children on that waiting list.
But everyone just needs a little bit of time to regroup, relax and process their experiences before we dash off headlong into what will be a very intense working pattern. If we don't take this time our vacancy rate will rise even further (we have so many nursing vacancies it is on the risk registrar for the hospital) and I worry about the impact on my colleagues mental health.
Once we get up and running again we will be working extended days as standard, I believe with 8pm finishes (tough luck if you have younger kids and wanted to see them before bed). We already start at 07:30 each morning so many colleagues don't see their kids then either.
We will be running all our theatres every Saturday too. The managers want to do Sunday working too but the clinical managers have said the workforce can't do it.
Even running extended days and Saturday sessions will require everyone to work quite a lot of additional hours. Yes, we will get paid but sometimes having some downtime / family time is more important than the £££.
Remember it was this government who instituted Brexit which has really contributed to the nursing vacancy rate as so many european colleagues have returned home because they feel unwelcome.
It was the Jeremy Hunt/ Teresa May led conservative government who removed the nursing bursary which had an immediate impact on nurse training numbers.
It is this government who have let NHS pay fall in real terms by around 10%. The effect on senior doctors pay is even more marked.
@Dishwashersaurous this is probably why the consultant you like so much does minimal NHS work and lots of private because his NHS salary isn't great and the private work pays his mortgage and kids school fees.
The press reports about doctors salaries don't tell you about the changes to the pension scheme which increased our contributions from