The Ways Of A City And Rural Doctor

A way for Rural Scotland's ongoing medical recruitment crisis to be addressed is by switching places with other doctors

. The scheme is aimed at maintaining the skills of island based consultants with low workloads by having them spend a week under more intense pressure at a city hospital. In return, the city consultant learns about the unique problems of rural medicine.

It is hoped the move may encourage senior medics to move to more rural areas and help tackle a recruitment problem. It is the Western Isles Hospital in Stornoway and Yorkhill in Glasgow who is responsible for this project. One locum pediatrician in Stornoway is presently spending a week in Yorkhill so that he can look into the many problems in the area.

The move is set to be repeated every eight weeks and could also involve consultants in other specialties in the future. Most consultants and other senior staff prefer not to work in the rural areas which make them feel isolated. Since the doctors in these rural communities are always on call, this project will allow them to take a break from night calls.

The problem of recruitment in rural areas is threatening the future of many specialist services. There are about half of Western Isles Hospital are locums, some short term ones have earned over GBP11,000 a week.

The locum bill could reach to about GBP1.5 million a year.

A pediatrician decided to pull out of retirement after 20 years at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, Britain's largest children's hospital. He worked until the new system is in place.

He stated that he does not believe that people are prepared to accept that any longer. Thanks to this project consultant services will not disappear.

There is a lack of balance still with children and doctors. In the Western Isles there are only about 5,000 children and it is hard for one pediatrician to handle everything.

Around 200 emergency admissions to the children's ward happen each year. Comparing that Yorkhill will deal with that in a week.

Here there are six children's beds in the hospital and the number of births is also expected to drop from around 200 a year now to 150 over the next decade It is the managed clinical network with a mainland center that will help save the area.

Apparently they have started negotiations with Yorkhill and would hope the system will be in place by the end of the year. Here a doctor can work to improve his skills, the patient will benefit from that and will keep the consultants in remote areas. For specialist medicine in remote and rural areas this is what will happen next.

For these doctors she does not believe that such jobs will be viable without the new system in place. Also she mentioned that advertisements for recruitments will not help unless the systems are in place. In this case if they do not go ahead with the new system they will be sending three times as many children to the mainland for treatment, a move that has big cost implications.

by: John Chambers

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