NHS consultants and work/life balance - how do you manage your child(ren) and working?

[sofasofachair851]

Just keen to hear how other consultants make it work. I am both dreading going back and looking forward to seeing my colleagues again.

Before Mat leave, I condensed my hours into 4 days a week and of course had on calls/weekends (10 sessions) so would sometimes have to work on my day off.

I don’t relish the idea of putting my child in nursery 5 days a week (I work 4 but I would like maybe a half day to sort life out/get a minute to myself) but my concern is, if I go down to 8 sessions (I.e 3 days a week) I will essentially be doing the same amount of work for less pay, it just looks better on paper. Not all sessions are created equal!

I appreciate everyone is different and there is no right way but I’m keen to hear what you do - do you wish you worked less for less money? Do you feel happy with the balance? Are your colleagues and trust supportive of LTFT?

thanks!

I think it depends quite a lot on your specialty. I'm an anaesthetist and it lends itself pretty well to LTFT as work comes in fairly discrete chunks and we don't have the same ongoing patient contact as lots of other specialities. My colleagues were always supportive but then my reducing hours didn't really affect their workload and there were always at least a few others who were part time in the department. I think it is probably quite a bit more difficult to write a LTFT job plan and maintain continuity of care in other departments.
You are right that there's pretty much always a bigger drop in pay than there is in actual work and there are inevitably sometimes meetings, courses etc on days when you're not supposed to be working, but I think that happens to people who don't work full time in lots of jobs, and overall I felt the pros of working LTFT outweighed the disadvantages. One thing that worked quite well for me is that I swapped some of clinical work for a non clinical role when my DC were school aged. That did mean taking more work home but it also gave me a day with a bit more flexibility than a theatre day so that I could almost always do the school run that day.
My DH isn't medical and he was able to negotiate a fairly flexible work pattern with his employers but knowing that there were days when I could be a bit more available made it easier for him too. It was quite a juggling feat at times and I won't deny it was sometimes really tough, but we made it work. It definitely gets easier in some ways as the children get older and can do more for themselves but new challenges arise - teens might not need you to make their breakfast but they tend to have more extracurriculars and still need their parents presence in their lives. For that reason, I stayed part time even when my children were older, though I do know other parents who have increased their hours again after dropping them when their children were little. We live in an area with very good state schools and housing costs that are lower than some other parts of the country so the loss of income didn't affect us too much and I was happy working 3.5 days a week - I feel I had the best of both worlds - but I can understand why people in different situations make different decisions.

Thanks for your reply. It’s nice to hear someone that feels they made the right choice as I think it’s so easy to feel guilt either way. I agree the specialty makes a difference - I’m medicine so for me the ward commitment is the hard bit but I feel there are ways around it.

LTFT.
DH equally committed to parenting and balancing our careers (our schedules sometimes feel like a military operation).
Nursery with early start/late finish options that's open almost all year.
Coffee. Lots of coffee.