News

Challenge to consultants’ contracts

New contracts for doctors, which will include annual reviews and a limit on their ability to moonlight in the private sector for seven years after working as consultants, may face a legal challenge.

Dr Peter Hawker, chair of the BMA consultants’ committee warned that consultants would have to sit down with the government to find out how the contract will work and ‘find out whether it’s legal’.

Doctors in their first few years working as consultants ‘do very little in private practice’, he claimed. As consultants work on average for the health service ‘over 50 hours a week’, cutting private practice could not be expected to ‘get them to do more’.

But prior to the announcement of the new contracts in the NHS Plan, the National Health Service Consultants’ Association welcomed an end to the ‘ambiguous allegiances of hospital specialists’.

Peter Draper, in the association’s Insight newsletter, said: ‘The NHS is short-changed by those consultants who work too long in the NHS and private day-to-day work’, which means they are ‘always too busy. One wonders what British Airways customers would say if its pilots thought they could work additional long hours instead of getting a break.’

NHS specialists who do private work are also under ‘subtle and not so subtle financial pressure to maintain NHS queues with long waiting times’, the association believes. A minority ‘defraud the NHS by not meeting the terms of their contracts’, Draper added.

According to recent research by the Consumers’ Association, 40 per cent of NHS hospital managers feel the private work of consultants leads to longer waiting lists for operations. More than two thirds of 90 NHS trust chiefs surveyed also believe that allowing consultants to engage in private practice has a negative impact on waiting lists for NHS operations and outpatient clinics

Further information on Insight is available from NHSCA c/o Hill House, Great Bourton, Banbury, Oxon, OX17 1OH. Email: nhsca@pop3.poptel.org.uk